charles newman's blog

Sprint 11 is the feature complete release of OSMF.  Lots of bugs were fixed for this release including the bug I mentioned in the Sprint 10 release blog post below about the MAST plugin and the SMIL plugin not working together.  In fact, in the AkamaiPluginSample all of the plugins are working nicely together.  This sample app has become the sample for demonstrating many of the OSMF plugins that reside in the OSMF repository.

For more details on this release, see this blog entry:

http://blogs.adobe.com/osmf/2010/04/osmf_fc1_released.html

Charles Newman Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, OSMF (Open Source Media Framework)

If you’ve been waiting for OSMF (Open Source Media Framework) to settle down, now is the time to dive in. This sprint was largely about locking down the API, but we added a few features as well:

• DVR Support. OSMF now supports DVR via Flash Media Server’s server-side DVRCast application. This feature allows clients to jump back in time while viewing a live stream.
• Syndication support (Atom 1.0, RSS 2.0, plus iTunes and Media RSS extensions).  You’ll see a new AS3 library in OSMF that can parse all of the major feed formats, plus the media-centric RSS extensions.  I’ve also updated the Akamai Plugin Sample app to load and parse an RSS feed and display a playlist.  If you load the MAST plugin before loading the RSS feed, you get a pre-roll ad before each video in the playlist. Note there is a bug with the MAST plugin and the SMIL plugin working together, I’m hoping to address this ASAP.
• Extended HTTP Streaming Support. OSMF now supports subclips for HTTP-streamed content, and DRM for HTTP-streamed content.

See the OSMF blog post here for more details on these features:

http://blogs.adobe.com/osmf/

As usual, if you have questions, you can post them to the OSMF forums:

http://forums.adobe.com/community/opensource/osmf/

Charles Newman Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, OSMF (Open Source Media Framework)

The latest release of OSMF is now available here:

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/osmf/Downloads

This is the work we did for Sprint 9, which concluded on January 20th. There are quite a few changes to the API and you can read the release notes for the specific changes.  The release notes have detailed descriptions of the API changes and should ease your pain when compiling your player against this new release.

Some of the new features in this release include:

• New OSMF Sample Player with Chrome (you can view it in action here (full source is included in this release): http://mediapm.edgesuite.net/osmf/swf/OSMFPlayer/OSMFPlayer.html)
• New SMIL plugin
• HTTP Streaming Support
• Enhanced plugin support

See the OSMF blog post here for more details on these features:

http://blogs.adobe.com/osmf/

We are currently heads down on Sprint 10, which will wrap up on February 24th.

As usual, if you have questions, you can post them to the OSMF forums:

http://forums.adobe.com/community/opensource/osmf/

Charles Newman Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, OSMF (Open Source Media Framework)

As of September 2009, Flash Player 10 is installed on 93.5% of the personal computers in mature markets. This includes the US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.

All the projects I work on target Flash Player 10 or higher, and I can’t keep count of how many times developers have asked me, “how can I make this code work with Flash Player 9″. Simple answer, you can’t, so stop asking ;)

Details are here:
Worldwide Ubiquity of Adobe Flash Player by Version

Charles Newman Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex

Brian Riggs, tech lead for the OSMF (Open Source Media Framework) project gave a nice overview of the framework this past Thursday. You can view the recorded Acrobat Connect session and check out lots of helpful links here:

http://groups.adobe.com/posts/010fc1b635

Charles Newman Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, OSMF (Open Source Media Framework)

Check out my post on the OSMF (Open Source Media Framework) blog about the new cue point feature in OSMF:
http://blogs.adobe.com/osmf/2009/11/cue_point_support_in_osmf.html

Charles Newman Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, OSMF (Open Source Media Framework)

Adobe Flash Builder 4 (formerly Adobe Flex Builder) is available on Adobe Labs:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashbuilder4/

Charles Newman Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex

Yes, you read that correctly.

See Lee Brimelow’s blog here:
http://theflashblog.com/?p=998

Charles Newman Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex

This baffled me for a few days.  I wrote a Flex app to try out Google’s Picasa Web API and it worked great in Firefox on a Mac.  But some of the images would not load in Safari (Mac or PC) and IE 7.  I eventually stumbled on a query string param that fixed it.

Apparently, some browsers limit the size of images to 800 pixels for the largest dimension.  If your images will not load in IE and Safari, try adding “imgmax=800″ on the query string when you request an image, like this:

http://photos.googleapis.com/data/feed/api/user/yourusername/album/youralbum?kind=photo&imgmax=800

Charles Newman Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, Google Picasa Web

Here is a simple and easy way to draw a rectangle with rounded corners in the Flash authoring environment:

1. Select the rectangle tool from the Tool Window.
2. Click and drag to draw the rectangle but do not release the mouse.
3. Use the up and down arrows to adjust the rounded corners.

This also works in Adobe Fireworks.

Charles Newman Adobe Fireworks, Adobe Flash