This tutorial is the first in a series of three that builds upon the first Flash Bandwidth & Port Detection tutorial I created a while back. These three articles look to make it even easier than the original post, and go more in depth on some of the streaming options, and have better structured server side code.
If you are interested in the original article, you can find it here.
Bandwidth detection is most important when connecting your users to the correctly compressed media to be streamed, recorded, or delivered via a …

After doing some research on live broadcasting events using streaming video, I happened to come across a beta Adobe product called Stratus which builds upon Adobe’s RTMP. Not to confuse RTMP (Real Time Media Protocol) with RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol), RTMFP is a new communication protocol built by Adobe that will let users connect and communicate using P2P between multiple clients running a Flash or Adobe AIR application.
Stratus as defined by Adobe…
Stratus is a hosted rendezvous service that aids in establishing communications between Flash Players or Adobe AIR …

One of my clients (borrispowell.com) has an upcoming fashion show, and we thought it would be pretty useful to promote the show as a streaming live production from his website the night of the unveiling of his latest creations. With this being one of his larger shows, we thought we would allow fans around the world to be able to watch the performance online, and for free.

Mogulus live broadcast tool seemed to be able to pull off the task of streaming the show for a pretty decent cost, and with …

Using Flex, it’s extremely easy to create a simple FLV player. This simple flv player has a scrub bar, pause/play buttons, and can load a flv from any url. The example is pretty basic, but it’s a great starting point on understanding how to stream video using Flex.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="vertical" verticalAlign="top" backgroundColor="white" viewSourceURL="srcview/index.html">
<mx:Script>
<![CDATA[
private function formatTime(item:Date):String {
…

Being able to detect a users bandwidth can be an important part of serving them streaming video. Using their bandwidth you can stream a video that will play well using their connection speeds.
The first step is to create our NetConnection.as file. This is used by our bandwidth checking script to connect to our Flash Media Server via RTMP, select an available port, and talk with our bw_check.asc to report the users available bandwidth.

import mx.events.EventDispatcher;
class NCManager extends Object {
// EventDispatcher needs these
var addEventListener:Function;
var removeEventListener:Function;
var dispatchEvent:Function;
var dispatchQueue:Function;
// Constants
private var k_DEFAULTCONNLIST = [{protocol:"rtmp", …

A friend my mine just asked me how he could find out how to detect his version of flash, so I wrote a quick bit of AS2 to help him out. Here’s a quick and easy way to detect a users flash version from within your Flash project.

//trace(eval("$version"));
version = eval("$version");
//The operating system: WIN, MAC, LNX
var osType;
//The player versions. 9,0,115,0
var majorVersion; 9
var majorRevision; 0
var minorVersion; 115
var minorRevision; 0
vers.text = version;
osArray = version.split(‘ ‘);
osType = osArray[0];
versionArray = osArray[1].split(‘,’);
majorVersion = versionArray[0];
majorRevision = versionArray[1];
minorVersion = versionArray[2];
minorRevision = versionArray[3];
feedback.text = "Operating System: "+osType + "\n" …

A small but very irritating problem started coming up during some development I’ve been working on in Flex. I kept getting errors when compiling in Flex Builder regarding some CSS.
“The type selector ‘classNameHere’ was not processed, because the type was not used in the application.”
It’s quite easy to turn this off by going into your project properties panel and select the Flex Compiler option and add the following into Additional compiler options:
-show-unused-type-selector-warnings=false
More on this subject here

Start using version control

Version control is like a big UNDO button for your coding. You can go back to your previous code revisions and can compare/rollback to specific code areas anytime you see necessary. It will keep track of all your changes and will empower you to track your development changes across your work/team. Also, in a distributed development team, version control helps prevent overwriting of code by team members and keeps all the members code up to date.
Subversion (SVN) is one of the most popular open source version control …

“Since bringing Flex to market, we’ve seen strong uptake among PHP developers, and we’re pleased to be collaborating with Zend and the PHP community to deliver deeper integration and increased productivity,” said David Wadhwani, General Manager, Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “The collaboration with Zend furthers Adobe’s commitment to open technology initiatives. Together, we will enable developers using Flex and Zend Framework to rapidly deliver highly engaging applications to both the browser and the desktop.” – David Wadhwani, General Manager, Platform Business Unit at Adobe.
This is really exciting, as a …