This year’s Flashbelt conference is getting closer. If you haven’t been here before you will be inclined to attend. I hear from several great sources that it is continually one of the year’s best Flash conferences. We heard about it enough from a bunch of friends that we regret missing the first one. It’s a small and intimate location with some of the most talented people in our industry. You are also invited to have a drink at the Influxis Mixers before the inspire sessions. There may still be conference passes available: http://www.flashbelt.com, get em if you can…

-jerry

The JW FLV Media Player, created by Jeroen Wijering (http://www.jeroenwijering.com) is a powerful tool that can be used not only to play back videos, but to create a rich user experience, add advertisements to content, monetize videos, and give a creative webmaster total control over the video interface. The player is fully compatible with Influxis, so you can use it with your existing account, with no changes needed.

In this article, I will explore some of the various things that can be done with the JW Player, including some cool things that have been requested by our customers.

First we’ll start out with the main Wizard page, which is the easiest place for anyone new to the JW Player to get started.

You will want to switch your Example Setup to “Mediaplayer with an RTMP Stream” first and foremost. Read the rest of this entry »

Some of our components and applications have the ability to automatically detect all the media files that are uploaded to your application streams directory. This is done through a server-side utility class we built a while back called Video.asc.

Before we get started here are the requirements for this tutorial:

Influxis Services (any size hosting plan)
FMIS 3
Flex Builder 3 or SDK

Source Files [optional]

Let’s start by creating a new main.asc file. At the present time FMIS server-side code is only compatible with ActionScript 1.0. You will need a text editor or ActionScript editor that lets you code in ActionScript 1.0 to create your main.asc file. Once you have your editor open, key this line of code into your file:

load("InfluxisVideoPlayer.asc" ); 

This will load the Video.asc file including any other resources it will need. Login to your Influxis account and create a folder called “videolist” inside that folder. Then create a subfolder called “streams”. Save your main.asc file and load it to the videolist folder you just created. That is pretty much all we need for the server- side code. Simple! Read the rest of this entry »

Guys, very cool… Our friend Seb, amazing what you can do with Flash, really… Enjoy!

http://www.vimeo.com/944162-Richard

Yesterday, I got an automated e-mail from the Influxis admin system that my bandwidth quota was approaching its limit for the month. Most of the FMIS applications I have running at Influxis are sample applications that I feature in my computer books, and I was a bit surprised to see THAT much bandwidth in use for sample videos and applications. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the access logs feature enabled on my Influxis account. So, I don’t have concrete evidence that outsiders were accessing my sample application folders in order to publish live streams—but I suspect that’s what was happening. For starters, any FMIS application is WIDE OPEN by default on Influxis accounts to make things quick and easy for you to get started. Because of this default behavior, which I think is a good default from Influxis’ point of view, anyone is allowed to connect to the application instance(s) and read/write to those application instance folders. The key word here is write. Yes, all connected clients can write shared objects to the application server instance (even persistent instances!) and publish/record live video streams to other connected clients. (Think big scale video conferencing happening with YOUR application instances and account!! I won’t even draw the mental picture of which types of video conferencing could be occurring. Oh wait, I just did.). Influxis does however recommend you secure your applications before deploying them and give you a lot of tools for securing your application using things like domain filtering. In my case that was not an option. Thankfully, there’s a very simple solution that you can quickly enable in the main.asc server-side ActionScript file in your application folder:

application.onConnect = function(clientObj){clientObj.writeAccess = “”;}

That’s it! This simple property value (”") effectively disables any publishing, recording, or writing of shared objects to your application instances. If you do need to allow publishing, recording, and any other writing of data, look into authentication routines you can use for your FMIS applications.

As you may already know Influxis recently released their newest pre-built application called TV Station. The TV Station allows Influxis customers to set up a time/calendar based media broadcasting service. Through the TV Station you can set up movies, music, and images to broadcast at a specific time on any date. The TV Station also has a built-in chat system to allow users to chat with each other while simultaneously viewing the broadcast. The TV Station even has a built-in live video interface which allows administrators to broadcast and record live video.

However, what some of you may not know is that the TV Station is very flexible. Through the available tools and api’s, everything from labels and skins can be changed. It’s possible to completely alter the entire look of the TV Station. With this in mind, you can set up the TV Station to do different things that even the original developers never thought of.

One such case was an idea to change the TV Station into an advertising tool. Through the TV Station, admin users can setup commercial schedules of various media (flv, mp3, swf, jpg, png, etc.) to air at the specific dates and times they want them to broadcast. The viewer end would then be embedded into the website as a banner (of any custom dimension). It would also come in handy if a moderator from the site wanted to make random announcements to the web site using the broadcast tools on the administration end. Setting this up would be easy and all that would be needed is a slight modification to the viewer end to allow the viewer video window to be embedded into the users desired web page. We would also need to take off all the extra controls so that the viewer end can appear as a banner on the website. Surprisingly, this is not very difficult to do and can be setup in a few minutes. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m sure some of you have already seen our Video Tutorials, but I thought I would let everyone know that we have updated the Video Tutorial page, and added a bunch of new videos. There are now 15 videos on a variety of topics, which I believe will be very helpful to everyone. We’re always adding new tutorials, so check back often!

You can find the tutorials here: Influxis Video Tutorials

I always appreciate feedback, so feel free to leave a comment or send me an email at robert@influxis.com with your questions or comments.

My last post on Influxis discussed the importance of using video frame dimensions for Flash Video that were multiples of 16. For example, 320×240 has a width and height divisible by 16, without any remainder. The 16x factor is important for optimal playback with both the On2 VP6 and Sorenson Spark codecs available in the FLV file format and Flash Player.

But what happens if you have a source video file with dimensions that are not 16x? I’ll give you an example that happened recently with a client of ours at [theMAKERS]. The client provided us with a high-quality MPEG-4 file having a video dimension of 720×480. This resolution is a non-square pixel aspect ratio, and when played/converted to a square pixel display such as a computer monitor, is 640×480. 640×480 is a perfect 16x resolution, but the video included a letter-boxed frame. (Letter-boxing is the addition of black bars above and below the video image, usually added when 16:9 aspect ratio film/video footage is being played back on a 4:3 aspect display like a standard definition (SD) television. You’ve probably noticed letter-boxing on widescreen DVD titles you’ve played on your old non-HD TV set.) Encoding the black areas of a letter-boxed just eat up valuable bitrate for video deployed over the Internet. The best practice is to crop the any letter-boxed area from the source video before encoding to another web-ready format. I prefer to use Adobe After Effects CS3 to do any video resizing, cropping, or deinterlacing. After I created a composition in After Effects and cropped out the letter-boxing, the final frame size was not a nice 16x resolution: 630×424. (BTW, to retain quality with the cropped output from After Effects, I used the super nice BitJazz SheerVideo codec. I talk about this codec in a Community MX tutorial.) Neither the width or height of this resolution is 16x friendly. So what’s a professional Flash Video expert supposed to do? The best solution is to slightly stretch the video’s dimension to the nearest 16x neighbor. Here’s a Flash movie I built that shows the 16x sizes from 96 to 2000 pixels:

Based on this table, you can see that the closest 16x resolution to the width of 630 is 624 and to the height of 424 is 432. I proceeded to use this resolution in my FLV Bitrate Calculator to build an appropriate FLV file. I also needed a lower resolution FLV file to target a lower bitrate, and came across another problem: the quarter resolution of 624×432, which is 312×216 is also not a 16x friendly resolution. I could have used the same stretch concept to go to 320×224, but that’s even more stretching upon the original 630×424 resolution. A better solution is to calculate a quarter of the original resolution, which is 315×212, and stretch from there: 320×208. So, in summary, always strive to use a 16x size for your Flash Video (FLV) content, even if you need to slightly stretch the dimensions of your source video. The distortion to the video image will not be noticeable in the final output. You can view the FLV content mentioned in this post at the client’s site, http://www.vermilionpictures.com/hearandnow. Click the small or large text link for the “View the Trailer” area at the top right corner of the Flash site.

Here is a FLV Bitrate Calculator developed by Robert Reinhardt. It will help you determine the optimal bitrate to encode your Flash videos at. Enjoy!

Recently, we had a customer ask a question about our new TV Station application:

An important point for us is that we need to embed the player (Viewer) into our own website. The actual viewer seems to have a large pre-existing border around it which we cannot reduce. Is there any access to the raw player object so that we can introduce it into our site effectively?

Here is what to do:

1. Open the settings.xml file with a text editor such as notepad and look for the alignVideo attribute in the rtmp tag:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<settings>
<!-- This is the rtmp connection to your influxis account -->
<!-- The video align option is for the viewer end only and keeps the video window from centering itself -->
<rtmp path="rtmp://yourinfluxisaccount.rtmphost.com/flv_Tester" port="1935" alignVideo="true" viewerLink="tvstation_viewer.html" />
</settings>

Once you find this tag, set it false. This should stop the viewer end from centering itself on the screen. Save and close the file once you are done.

2. Now open the admin end of the TV Station and open the station settings. You can find the station settings button on the top left part of the screen in edit mode.

3. Once the station settings are open, look for the receiver options and adjust the width and height dimensions to the desired size.

4. Make sure you uncheck any constrain or autosize options. Save the settings when you are done and close the admin end.

5. Next, you will need the viewer end source fla. You should be able to download it via the link in the included readMe file that is available with the TVStation download.

6. Once you have the source file, open it in a flash editor. We recommend using Flash 8 if you can but you should be able to use Flash CS3. You can download a trial version from the main Adobe website at www.adobe.com.

7. Open the tvstation_viewer.fla and go to the second frame where you will see the viewer end components. Cut off any extra whitespace until you have reached the size you set for the window. Make sure you leave enough room for the chat module on the left and the list to the right. Be sure to back up the old files before you do this in case there are any errors or mistakes.

8. Save and compile a new swf and html. Make sure the html has the same html code that was in the old one ( except for the different width and height dimensions ). This should allow for continued use of the Full Screen mode.

9. Test the new files and then replace the old ones on your web server. Make sure you also replace the settings.xml file.