Monthly Archives: February 2007

Presenting at the VRA Conference

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I’ll be presenting my work with Flash Media Server and the DUVAGAII project as part of a panel on March 29th at the Visual Resources Association‘s 25th Anniversary conference. It should be a fairly interesting panel and I will be demonstrating some of the video tools I’ve authored allowing instructors to produce short clips of longer film materials online, at their leisure, for presentation in the classroom and on the web. For anyone interested in using the Flash Platform, Coldfusion, and Flash Media Server for dynamic video delivery, this should be a panel worth attending!

A Burgeoning Beyond Restraint: Delivering Video, Audio, and Image Data to the Classroom

With advances in presentation platforms, file storage systems, and the increasing functionality and power of computer hardware, software, and network infrastructures, there is very little to hold back an educational institution from implementing a full-featured, bleeding-edge multimedia delivery system. During this session, we will demonstrate different systems built to take advantage of these advances in digital technology, and begin a discussion to further advance the development and implementation of such systems, while remaining mindful of very real restrictions placed upon us by fair use and intellectual property considerations.

During this session we will address three important areas software and hardware requirements for storage and delivery, the development and usage of advanced media delivery tools, and a discussion of questions surrounding copyright and security policies.

System demonstrations will include the DU-VAGA media presentation application, the ALORA digital object repository application, and the Media Mill storage, processing and delivery service.

Flash Media Encoder Released

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Just picked up the news from Flashcomguru that the Adobe Flash Media Encoder has been released. I’d previously tested the beta version off of Adobe Labs and was very pleased with the results. We had looked into the streaming of live events through Flash Media Server previously, but due to the limitations of the Spark codec had dismissed FMS (for live events) in favor of MPEG4. This is huge!

Flash Player Security Sandbox is Smothering Me…

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I’m currently building a standalone app in Flash/AS2 translated to an execuatable via Screenweaver. What has really been a downer are the incredible restictions placed upon BitmapData.draw(), which is used heavily throughgout the application. The really terrible thing is that we own all of the domains the loaded images and video are originating from, but since a standalone app is not necessarily part of any domain, I cannot use the draw() method on any of the digital objects being loaded into this app. I understand that there is a way around this in ActionScript 3.0 using “LoaderContext.checkPolicyFile”, but we need a solution for AS2. The image loading I can get around with a proxy script but (as I understand it) there is no way to successfully invoke draw() on an flv streaming from a Flash Media Server.

I’m looking forward to the Apollo beta release on labs to see whether or not some of these restrictions will be lifted within that runtime. I imagine Apollo would be ideal for this app but since there is so little information out there- I can really only hope at this point.

Multiple Application Directories (Flash Media Server)

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It’s a dead simple task to set up multiple application directories in Flash Media Server 2. I’ve been trying to figure out exactly how to do this for a while now (on and off) and the simplicity of it is astounding. I was under the false impression that this would require configuring a number of vhosts on the server- each pointing to a separate directory or partition housing many apps. This is thankfully not the case. All that needs to be done is to change the VHOST.APPSDIR entry in ‘fms.ini’ to a semicolon-separated list of directories/partitions/whatever. That is it. I’ve never seen mention of this in the documentation. Maybe I just missed it?

Some examples of this follow:
VHOST.APPSDIR = C:\appsdirectory1;C:\appsdirectory2
VHOST.APPSDIR = E:\;F:\

First Public Flex Module

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I’ve placed my first public Flex module into my portfolio as a feedreader for this website. It’s a very simple module using no ActionScript to speak of and components are being styled directly from within their properties. It’s a good first step with Flex and something that is useful for me, so I view it as a success. The next step for my learning experience will probably be the integration of ActionScript within an app and either styling the components globally, or re-skinning them alltogether.

Coming from the Flash/ActionScript side of things, it’s been difficult getting a grasp on Flex and how everything works on that side. I’ve done a number of small experiments in the past few months but nothing useful till now. It’s beginning to come together for me though- I have the feeling that after the initial hurdle, things will explode for someone already familiar with ActionScript.

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