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After several recent announcement around Adobe's LiveCycle platform, it may not come as a surprise to some that the LiveCycle Collaboration Service (formerly Cocomo, formerly Flash Collaboration Service) will be shut down at the end of 2012. What may be a surprise however is the relatively short notice that Adobe is giving existing customers and a total lack of a migration path, leaving many people in a real tight spot.

Remember that LCCS is a hosted collaboration service, effectively cloud based, that allows developers to build real-time communications right into their Flex applications. The work that has gone into LCCS is impressive, and the platform offers a range of great features such as room provisioning APIs, live and audio and video communications (both over RTMFP and RTMP) and even screensharing capabilites (but let's not warm that topic up again...).

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Posted on March 23, 2012 at 8:34 AM. 4203 views. Print

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As one of the main contributors to the Red5 project, Paul Gregoire is a well known name in the community. Yesterday he posted a link to an AIR for Android app he built to the Flash Media List and I'm republishing his link here as I think many of you will find this app quite useful.

The Broadcaster Android app allows you to broadcast audio and video to an RTMP server such as Red5, and also works with FMS and Wowza. What's more, the app is free and will run on pretty much any Android device with Android 2.2 and up.

You can download the Broadcaster app from the Android Market.

But apart from being useful, the app also shows that AIR for Android can be quite versatile and allows you to easily publish what is essentially a Flex application to a mobile platform.

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Posted on January 12, 2012 at 2:37 PM. 3219 views. Print

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Recently I had the task of recreating a video player for a customer for which no source code was available. The player needed to support on demand and live streaming, so I opted for an OSMF based player - why reinvent the wheel?

Things went well until the time came to add the live streaming support. The chosen CDN uses the FCSubscribe method for live streaming. In case you don't know, FCSubscribe is a serverside method which the player needs to call in order to instruct the CDN to deliver the requested stream to the edge server that you are connected to in order to play the stream.
Some CDNs (including Akamai and Limelight) provide custom OSMF plugins for this task, and if your CDN does the same then you have nothing else to do apart from using their plugin and you are set. However some CDNs do not (yet) provide such plugins, and since the task of creating one is no mean feat (and it was certainly not part of the budget for the player I was working on), another solution had to be found.

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Posted on December 20, 2011 at 9:41 AM. 1645 views. Print

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I've just fixed the (now ancient) FMS bandwidth tester. It's based on some pretty old code by Adobe engineer Pritham Shetty and wasn't working since I rebranded the blog - well now it's functional again and I plan to connect it to a new server soon.

The neat thing about this FMS app is that it checks bandwidth both to and from the server - this is very useful if you build RTC based apps that utilise things such as webcam video or live audio.
If right now the speed results seem low then that's probably due to the very old machine I'm using to host the app... Believe it or not, the server is still the same one from back in 2005!

FMS bandwidth tester

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Posted on December 13, 2011 at 2:32 PM. 2174 views. Print

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Due to several enquiries I've had over the last few weeks I have decided to put the old FlashComGuru forum back online for reference pirposes. It can be found at forum.therealtimeweb.com (or http://www.therealtimeweb.com/forum) and has been put there for reference purposes only. I have no plans to enable new signups again but would encourage people to sign up to this site's mailing list instead.

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Posted on December 5, 2011 at 7:52 AM. 1283 views. Print

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I know I am late to the game with this post (sorry, been busy...) but it's nevertheless worth noting that Flash Media Server 4.5 is now out.
So what's new in this version? Most notable is the support for HLS streaming - with this FMS is now capable of delivering live and on-demand video to devices and HTML5 browsers supporting the HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) formats, which most importantly includes iOS devices.
Now despite what some sensationalist 'tech blogs' would have you believe this is not 'Flash-free Flash on iOS'. Instead this new feature offers the possibility to deliver a particular piece of video content to more than one platform via FMS. The server achieves this by repackaging the existing video file into a compatible format for delivery over HDS and HLS. This means that publishers don't have t worry ahead of time about the platforms they want to target and can now deliver the same piece of media to both Flash and iOS.

Check out FMS 4.5 and download the free developer edition from Adobe's website.

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Posted on September 20, 2011 at 11:16 AM. 2646 views. Print

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A few weeks ago I was testing some of the FMS4 features on a Windows EC2 instance. My goal was to use RTMFP (usually used for peer to peer communications in Flash) in a client-server mode, basically replacing RTMP in order to achieve lower latency.
In case you do not want to read the entire post below, here's were I went wrong:
1) I did not open port 1935 over UDP, only TCP. As it turned out, RTMFP does require port 1935 over UDP for the initial contact. 2) I didn't configure the HostPort directive in Adaptor.xml correctly. Instead of adding the public attribute I had added the IP just to the node valu.
Instead of

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Posted on July 20, 2011 at 12:21 PM. 3953 views. Print

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*** Update, follow-up post added ***

Interesting news:
http://sites.google.com/site/webrtc/home

The WebRTc project by Google aims to enable web browsers with RTC capabilities over JavaScript APIs. For me this may just be the incentive to pick up JavaScript again. For FMS this means even more pressure outside its core function of streaming video.

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Posted on June 1, 2011 at 11:48 AM. 4183 views. Print

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I've just realised that an email reply I wrote on the FlashMedia List would actually make a good blog post. I wrote it in response to someone pointing once again to the death of Flash, brought up by mobile and HTML5.

Actually I see emerging platforms as a big opportunity for Flash, not a threat. Why was Flash successful in the first place? Cross platform consistency.

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Posted on May 11, 2011 at 5:52 PM. 4064 views. Print

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Oh what a mess. I had hoped this would not happen but here we are: Apparently Adobe filed a lawsuit against Wowza Media Systems last week alleging "patent infringement and unfair competition complaints regarding Wowza's business practices".

I do not have any specific details on the lawsuit and am merely reporting to the press release I received via email from Wowza. In it Wowza's David Stubenvoll states:
"Adobe's lawsuit against our company is completely without merit, and we look forward to resolving this matter in court. Wowza's position is that it does not infringe on Adobe patents and that we have engaged only in skillful and fair competition with Adobe. For the implementation in question, we disclosed our activities to Adobe more than five years ago and continued to be open and up front with Adobe regarding our activities. It is only after five years of Wowza growth, independent technology innovation, and market leadership that Adobe unexpectedly filed this unfounded and spurious lawsuit.

Wowza has always had a policy of timely, accurate communications with all current and prospective licensees, and so we have made the decision to communicate this matter swiftly. This action is not anticipated to interrupt our current product offering or future product plans. We will continue to innovate and provide the market with the best technology at reasonable prices while we respond in court to these unfounded allegations. We remain confident in our intellectual property position and welcome the opportunity to settle this matter definitively."

Let's see how this pans out, but in the end there will be no winners. In most people's eyes Wowza have developed a top notch product and provided great support to developers, offering a lower priced and feature rich alternative to Flash Media Server.
Honestly I feared something like this may be on the horizon, but I would have out bets on an acquisition of Wowza by Adobe instead - guess that option is out of the window now. Lisa seems to agree with me.

Anyone know where I can find the details of the lawsuit?

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Posted on May 10, 2011 at 7:12 PM. 5594 views. Print

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