Client.videoSampleAccess False-Negative

In past versions of FMS, developers were barred from accessing raw audio and video data over RTMP and had to resort to a number of hacks and proxies to get around the restriction.  As time went by and new versions of the Flash Player were released, a lot of these loopholes were blocked as well.

With FMS3, there is Client.videoSampleAccess: a property of the Flash Media Server 3 that allows direct access to raw stream data for video use (“audioSampleAccess” for audio).  This can be used for things like producing visual audio spectrums or grabbing a still from a video stream.  It is applied within the onConnect method of the Application server class as demonstrated here:

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appClient.audioSampleAccess = "/";
appClient.videoSampleAccess = "/";

In the above example, the “/” signifies that any streams within the application directory are allowed to be sampled in this way.  You can also specify a semicolon-delimited list of folder names instead if you need to be picky.

Something I came across today and the whole point of this post: even when you have Client.videoSampleAccess set up properly on Flash Media Server, you will still receive a security sandbox violation error #2123 if the stream data is not available.  This can easily happen if you have a timer invoking BitmapData.draw every few milliseconds on loading content.

One way to get around this is using NetStatusEvent.NET_STATUS making sure it reports “NetStream.Buffer.Full” before attempting to access the stream data.  Depending on what you are doing, you can oftentimes check the object recieving the stream data to be sure it is accessible first.  this all seems really obvious now, but threw me for a bit of a loop, initially.

“A Prison of Oneself” Update – Now at Vendetta!

Vendetta Music is a neat independent music store located in Denver, CO off Broadway and Bayaud.  They carry a lot of unique pieces and now “A Prison of Oneself” can be purchased there as well.

Special thanks to Jesse Sola of Numina for hooking me up with this great location.

As a side note; “Prison” can also be purchased at iTunes, Amazon, CDBaby and many others…

Flex Builder 3 – “Building Workspace” Limbo

I have this problem with Flex Builder 3.  If I have “Build Automatically” checked under “Project”, my workspace gets stuck in this “Building Workspace” limbo and can never launch any projects for testing unless I toggle this setting back off.

I’ve had the feature disabled for a few months now, but with the release of AIR 1.1 and the Flex 3.0.2 SDK, I decided to try and enable it again.  Unfortunately, this has had no affect on this particular issue- so it must be more FB-related than SDK-related.

If anyone has any insight on this issue- I’m all ears.

AIR: Window vs. NativeWindow

This one threw me for a loop.  So I’ve been using the flash.display.NativeWindow class to create new windows in AIR (via Flex) since the beta releases.  Historically, this has been a pain when you want to add MXML components to the native window as addChild() does not work with the NativeWindow class unless that child object is first added to some other MXML container.  Somewhat of a pain, in practice.

Apparently, the mx.core.Window class was added in AIR 1.0 to resolve this problem.  The Window class is a sort of UIComponent wrapper for a NativeWindow.  This allows you to add other components directly to the Window through addChild().  Though in my particular situation, it simply caused more issues as the Window component class seems to inherit the properties of your initial application window somewhat- therefore, if you are trying to generate chromeless, transparent windows in a standard application interface… you can’t.

In the end, I find flash.display.NativeWindow a lot more flexible than mx.core.Window… and it is most likely a bit lighter in terms of the codebase as well.  The Window class may be a good option in some situations, and it’s really good to know that it exists.  You can never have too many options!

New Updates

I’m really excited about a lot of developments that have been happening over the past few weeks and into the next few months!  This has prompted me to resurrect this website and begin posting again.

So… just a quick notification that the site will be updated soon with the expectation of regular, informative, and hopefully interesting commentary and useful information.