The University of Denver made a strong commitment to delivering rich media for classroom use across campus years ago and we are still going strong. This presentation will cover every aspect of video capture, cataloging, and delivery at DU today through custom-developed solutions as well as failures and lessons learned.

Join Adobe in this three-part seminar series to learn how you can create and stream engaging video on the web.

Session 1: Video Use Cases in Higher Education: Expand your audience through video

Discover new and exciting ways to increase the exposure, enrollment, and fundraising potential of your university through the use of video on your university’s website. From distance learning, to the broadcast of live athletic events and artistic performances, to campus tours and new student orientation, all of this and more can be brought to life on your website, increasing the interest of potential students, keeping alumni engaged in their alma mater, and thereby bringing more revenue to your institution.

Hear from representatives from the University of Denver about their successes with Flash video on their campus!

Presenters:

Joseph Labrecque
Senior Multimedia Application Developer
Adobe Higher Education Leader
University of Denver

Leslie Trumble
Director Visual Media Center
University of Denver

Session 2: From Concept to Distribution: Products that will help you capture, edit, and distribute your video online

Learn about the Adobe video workflow from end-to-end. We will start with authoring content in Adobe® Creative Suite® 4 Production Premium and follow the process to Adobe Flash® Media Server for secure streaming of video content to your website. John will talk about some of the workflow options that are particularly relevant to educational usage of streaming video including the robust options that are available for Digital Rights Management of Adobe Flash Video.

Presenter:

John Schuman
Solution Architect
Digital Video Solutions
Adobe

Session 3: Making it all happen: A discussion of how to implement a video solution at your institution

In this final session, you will learn how to implement a video solution on your campus, using the tools and technologies previously presented in this series. Nick and John will go deeper into the technology behind a complete video solution, steps for implementation and decisions to be made in your implementation, all the way through getting video live on your website.

Presenters:

John Schuman
Solution Architect
Digital Video Solutions
Adobe

Joseph Labrecque
Senior Multimedia Application Developer
Adobe Higher Education Leader
University of Denver

Nick Hippe
Sales Engineer
Digital Media
Adobe

A few weeks after the event, I was contacted by the Adobe Education team to gauge my interest in being part of a seminar series they were putting together around how universities are implementing video solutions across campus. DU CourseMedia™ will be one of the points of focus in the upcoming seminar series.

Please learn more and register for the event to join us through Adobe Connect for the following sessions:

1. SESSION 1 – Video Use Cases in Higher Education: Expand your audience through video (September 9)
2. SESSION 2 – From Concept to Distribution: Products that will help you capture, edit, and distribute your video online (September 16)
3. SESSION 3 – Making it all happen: A discussion of how to implement a video solution at your institution (September 23)

I’ll be presenting on both the 1st and 3rd sessions along with Sandy Balzer, John Schuman, and Nick Hippe from Adobe. DU’s Leslie Trumble will also be joining us in presenting Session 1 to contribute her unique perspective on faculty usage through her work at the Visual Media Center.

Register!

This started as a simple mechanism to display a live RTMP stream from Flash Media Server to a client machine and related projection system. So… not for broadcast over the web- just sending a live stream from one physical location to another.

While developing the application, I came across the need to test an RTMP stream and it was so simple using this app that I decided to expand it. In the current version (0.9.0), it will accept RTMP and HTTP streams- just type in the URL and you can easily test it in order to verify that it is correct before trying to publish anything on a website or whatnot. You can also use it as a fullscreen projection or display mechanism as was originally intended.

If you have some FLVs or MP4s or whatnot on your local machine- you can just drag those into the app to watch them. I’m thinking about adding some playback controls and other options a bit later.

Application for display of video streams via RTMP, HTTP, or local filesystem. Just drag in a file or enter a stream address and away we go!

At the University of Denver, we have built a good number of AIR applications at this point. Some are internal data management tools, others are full, complex, private applications such as the VPS Projection system, and then we have small utility apps like this which others may also find some use for. These we make available to others free of charge as part of our community outreach.

I’ve read the documentation on FMS3 security features and have used quite a few myself.  Knowing these features, I could not understand how the Flash Player security model could be at fault- it seemed much more likely that the developers simply didn’t cover all their bases.

Whenever I read something like this, I am naturally concerned as I’ve thrown quite a bit of support behind FMS over the years.

Well, it seems that my hunch was correct and Adobe is not to blame.  People are far too quick to pass judgement on things like this, whether it’s Adobe, Microsoft, Apple or some other giant corporation, everyone jumps on the bandwagon when a story like this breaks.  Give it a rest…

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.

I’d recommend anyone having weird issues with FMS2 to upgrade as soon as you possibly can. It only takes about 15 minutes and will preserve all your current applications. I did need to update some of my client SWFs- but only because of how much more accurate this new version is.

While I had to continually monitor FMS2 for various problems, this new server has been nothing but stable, fast, and just a great performer all-around! I am honestly so pleased with the results that I want to give a general ‘thanks’ to the team involved in this latest release. You have taken a load off my shoulders!

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import flash.net.NetConnection;
import flash.net.ObjectEncoding;
NetConnection.defaultObjectEncoding = flash.net.ObjectEncoding.AMF0;

The error “Unknown object type tag (17)” was being generated by CF8 as I attempted to pass an Object in AS3 over remoting to CF8 interpreted as a Structure. Apparently, there is also the need to wrap any such Object within a container Object for it to be properly read by the CFC:

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var wrapper:Object = new Object();
wrapper.submissionObject = submissionObject;
submissionResponder = new Responder(onSubmissionResult, onSubmissionError);
testConnection.call("some.cfc.Test", submissionResponder, wrapper);

The CFC function expects a Structure named “submissionObject” in this case.

I hope this is helpful for someone- I had a hell of a time digging up this information.

PLEASE, Adobe…

Allow developers to access RTMP streams via BitmapData.draw() and SoundMixer.computeSpectrum()… please!

Features important to my projects include:

• Improved performance
• H.264 and AAC streaming support
• New security features
• Improved live video support
• Tracking

Read more at the FAQ:
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pdfs/FMS3FAQ.pdf

I was able to install the server on Windows Vista and had a custom FLV stream piggybacked in a preconfigured sample application directory running in about 40 minutes. The structure is not entirely different from FMS, but is drastic enough to cause me a bit of confusion. For example, with FMS applications, you have an application directory within which are normally a “main.asc” file to configure the app, and a “streams” folder which contains any media content. With Red5, it seems there is a bit more to it: a variety of different files/filetypes to configure and very little documentation on how to start a simple video stream from scratch. In fact, I could not get anything going myself, and had to resort to a piggyback approach using a preconfigured application directory.

Aside from the initial confusion, I do see Red5 as a great product and attribute most of my difficulties to differences in the FMS framework. I’ll probably continue to experiment with the current release but am hoping for better documentation in the future. When this server reaches 1.0, I would love to give it another shot!