Search Results for "osmf"

Howdy loyal readers:

I've gone ahead and posted on Almer/Blank Labs the slides and sample source files from my talk @ FITC SF, 'Getting Started with OSMF', which I'll be giving tomorrow afternoon @ 2:30 in Conference Room 1.

I thought it'd be fun to get this stuff posted in advance of the talk so attendees can follow along if they want.

I will not be recording the session -- it is, however, very similar to the session I recorded at FITC Toronto, in April, and which remains posted here, on Almer/Blank Labs.

Share and enjoy!

-r

I'll be heading up to FITC SF next week, to give two talks. One on working with the Adobe Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), called 'Getting Started with OSMF and one on the Synthia project, called 'Hearing Pictures with Synthia'.

I'm excited to give both. But I've just this moment finished tuning the version of Synthia that I will be demonstrating. In Amsterdam and Toronto earlier this year, I discussed, from a creative perspective, many of the steps I went through to create the publicly usable version of Synthia, which you can play with at SynthiaHearsPictures.com.

But in recent weeks, I started work on a new version of Synthia -- or rather, a new way of playing Synthia. The web version of Synthia is played just by selecting a photo. In this new version of Synthia (which will not be made available online, because of hardware requirements), Synthia *composes* a track (and provides instrumentation) from a source image, but *you* control playback -- with the webcam and a custom glove that I made.

The glove, pictured here with this post, has seven sensors not-so-secretly-hidden in it: three distance sensors, three buttons, and a bend sensor. Each is wired into this new version of Synthia to control playback (along with additional hooks for webcam motion detection), to create a really fun, active and engaging musical experience.

To see the Synthia Glove in action, don't miss my talk, 'Hearing Pictures with Synthia', 11:15A, on Tuesday, August 17th, day one of the conference.

Share and enjoy!

-r

Good morning, dear readers:

Our little OSMF continues to mature at a rapid pace. The most recent announcement is the release of Flash Media Playback and Strobe Media Playback.

One item that's made it a bit more difficult for some users to work with OSMF is that it comes with no GUI components (such as the FLVPlayback component in Flash). That means you have to code up your own video player interfaces if you want to work with OSMF.

Well, not anymore. Flash Media Playback (FMP) and Strobe Media Playback (SMP) are two ways that you can work with pre-packaged Flash GUIs build on OSMF.

From the docs:

Flash Media Playback is an out-of-the-box, feature-rich, free media player suitable for designers, content owners, IT professionals, and developers. It is designed to be your simplest deployment solution. You use a setup assistant to configure the player with a few mouse clicks. Because Adobe hosts the player for you, there’s nothing for you to install or keep updated. And users experience fast downloads, because the player is stored in their Flash cache.

Strobe Media Playback provides more flexibility than Flash Media Playback, while still helping you get up and running quickly. Like Flash Media Playback, the Strobe Media Playback player is both free and easy to customize. Unlike Flash Media Playback, the Strobe Media Playback player is open source, available both as a compiled SWF file and as uncompiled source code. And, because it is a download, it can be deployed behind firewalls, where the Flash Media Playback player cannot.

So, FMP is pre-compiled, hosted by Adobe, and easy to configure and embed in your websites.

SMP is an open-source OSMF-based player, that you can use as-is, or open, edit, customize and re-deploy on your own websites.

I will be teaching how to skin SMP in detail in my Bring-Your-Own-Laptop session at MAX, 'Designing Custom Video Players with OSMF' (you can browse the catalog of talks and presentations and then you can register here).

Share and enjoy!

-r

I've finally started work on my OSMF lab for MAX, 'Designing Custom Video Players with OSMF' (you can browse the catalog of talks and presentations and then you can register here).

And, as part of that, I updated the sample OSMF code for Flash, that I had written in April for OSMF 0.95, to work with OSMF 1.0.

You can read about the minor changes, and download the current source, here, at Almer/Blank Labs.

Share and enjoy!

-r

Good evening, faithful readers:

I just received word this morning that Adobe has made me a MAX Master Speaker. This is the inaugural year for the MAX Masters program, and it means that I have had an average rating of at least 4.8/5 from at least 50 MAX attendees.

I consider this designation a real privilege. I take my speaking engagements very seriously, and it is nice to feel that effort rewarded in such a tangible way -- especially in the context of a conference like MAX, which has so many high-level speakers.

I'm currently set to run a lab on building OSMF video players, but I believe that I will also be giving my Practical AS3 lecture, as well (the version of that same talk from last year's MAX is viewable here, on Adobe TV).

The MAX Session Scheduler has gone live. Check it out. And see you in October!

And, before signing off, I want to note this MAX Master designation is one that I particularly enjoy, because I also happen to be Max's master -- he's the brindle labrador/rat terrier/pit bull (aka 'Lab Rat') pictured here, next to me and Leila:

Share and enjoy!

-r

Howdy all:

I know blogging's been light for the past several months. Work at Almer/Blank has had me pretty consumed.

But, as I gear up and prepare for a busy autumn of talks and courses, you can expect some heavier posting.

First up, I'll be presenting at FITC San Francisco -- the first SF installment of the really amazing FITC conferences.

On day one, August 17th, I'll be giving my talk, 'Hearing Pictures with Synthia' -- you can see an earlier version of that talk, from FITC Toronto in April, here, and play with Synthia at SynthiaHearsPictures.com.

Then, on day three, August 19th, I'll be giving a talk on 'Getting Started with Adobe Open Source Media Framework (OSMF)' in the 'Adobe Under the Hood' room -- a version from FITC Toronto in April you can view here.

It will be an amazing conference, with a ton of great talks. Early bird pricing ends July 2nd, so get your tickets now!

Share and enjoy!

-r

The OSMF team sent this to me to help get the word out, and I wanted to pass it along to you all.

On Wednesday, June 9th, Adobe will be hosting a FREE 90-minute session, run by Lisa Larson-Kelley, on the formal launch of the 1.0 version of the Adobe Open Source Media Framework (OSMF). Lisa will also cover the beta release of "Strobe Media Playback," a pre-compiled SWF media player (including source code) based on OSMF.

[blockquote]In this session, Lisa Larson-Kelley will introduce you to the fundamentals of Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), Adobe’s standard video player libraries for building playback experiences and monetizing video on the web. She’ll give you a high-level overview of why you’d want to use OSMF and what it can do, and then dive into its underlying structure and some simple sample code to get you started. This session is for beginner to intermediate programmers and web developers who want to gain a better understanding of OSMF, and how it can simplify media player development.[/blockquote]

The invitation is here and you may register here.

Share and enjoy!

-r

UPDATE 2009-04-29: I've removed the files linked from this post, as they are now available through Almer/Blank Labs, including the video capture of the talk, as well as the slides and source files, here at this link.

I have a few free moments here at FITC Toronto, and I wanted to post the slides and files (20 MB) from the talk I just completed, 'Standardize Your Flash With Adobe Open Source Media Framework'.

Download the Files (20MB)

As I said during the talk, these files were built with the Sprint 10 (v0.9) version of OSMF, and since I've been in Toronto, Sprint 11 (v0.95) has come out and I haven't had time to test these files yet to see if they still work.

I'll definitely be updating all of my samples as we approach the 1.0 release of OSMF, so stay tuned.

Until then, share and enjoy!

-r

I'm continuing work on my FITC Toronto talk, 'Standardize Your Flash with Adobe OSMF', and the files to accompany it.

OSMF certainly has features and functionality for hard-core developers to build powerful media-rich experiences. But OSMF also makes basic media player code really easy for those users of Flash who might not consider themselves developers, but who still are comfortable coding on the timeline.

One of the issues with the still nascent, but growing at an impressive rate OSMF documentation, is that almost all the sample code is for users of Flex Builder / Flash Builder -- and all of the sample code for Flash assumes use of external class files.

But using OSMF does not require coding in external class files. So, to illustrate that point, I've gone ahead and modified the simplest possible OSMF video player from Adobe's documentation to code that works on the timeline. Which I'm posting here.

So this is code (OSMF Sprint 10 v0.93) you can paste onto any timeline that will play video with OSMF.

Want to make it stream the video instead of playing it progressively? Point it to an RTMP URL instead, and it will automatically play.

import org.osmf.containers.MediaContainer;
import org.osmf.elements.VideoElement;
import org.osmf.media.MediaPlayer;
import org.osmf.media.URLResource;
// Create the container class that displays the media.
var container:MediaContainer = new MediaContainer();
//add the MediaContainer instance to the stage
addChild(container);
// Create the resource to play and point it to the FLV
var resource:URLResource=new URLResource("my.flv");
// Create the MediaElement
var videoElement:VideoElement=new VideoElement(resource);
//add the VideoElement to our container class
container.addMediaElement(videoElement);
//create the MediaPlayer instance
var mediaPlayer:MediaPlayer = new MediaPlayer();
// Set the MediaElement on a MediaPlayer.
//Because autoPlay defaults to true, playback begins immediately.
mediaPlayer.media=videoElement;

Share and enjoy!

-r

I'm writing some new sample files for OSMF in preparation for my presentation, 'Standardize Your Flash with Adobe OSMF,' which I'll be giving on April 27th at FITC Toronto.

Last time I checked (February), OSMF was in Sprint 9 (and I updated my sample files at that time, posted here). Now, it's in Sprint 10, specifically version 0.93. And Adobe appears to have done a lot to lock down the API, which is definitely an exciting and positive development.

But, of course, there are some significant changes since the Sprint 9 OSMF framework -- so even the files I posted just two months ago are no longer valid. So, since I wrote it as one of the sample files for my talk, I figured I would post the code to run dynamic streaming with OSMF v0.93.

Here is a Flash CS4 document class, assuming you already have your OSMF SWC in your library path.

package
{
    import flash.display.Sprite; 
 
	import org.osmf.media.MediaPlayer;
	import org.osmf.containers.MediaContainer;
	import org.osmf.media.URLResource;
	import org.osmf.net.NetLoader;
	import org.osmf.elements.VideoElement;
	import org.osmf.utils.URL;
	import org.osmf.net.DynamicStreamingResource ;
	import org.osmf.net.DynamicStreamingItem ;
 
    public class MyPlayer extends Sprite
    { 
 
		private const RTMP_URL : String = "rtmp://myhost" ;
 
        public function MyPlayer()
        {
			player = new MediaPlayer ( ) ;
			container = new MediaContainer ( ) ;
			addChild ( container ) ;
			//set the player to play videos only once by default
			player.autoRewind=false;
			var resource : DynamicStreamingResource = new DynamicStreamingResource ( RTMP_URL ) ;
			var vector : Vector.<DynamicStreamingItem> = new Vector.<DynamicStreamingItem> ( 3 ) ;
			vector [ 0 ] = new DynamicStreamingItem ( "myMovie_high" , 1500 ) ;
			vector [ 1 ] = new DynamicStreamingItem ( "myMovie_low" , 400 ) ;
			vector [ 2 ] = new DynamicStreamingItem ( "myMovie_medium" , 600 ) ;
			resource.streamItems = vector ;
			videoElement = new VideoElement( resource ) ;
			player.media = videoElement ;
			container.addMediaElement ( videoElement ) ;
        } 
 
		private var player:MediaPlayer;
		private var container:MediaContainer;
		private var videoElement : VideoElement ;
 
    }
}

Share and enjoy!

-r

rblank9: Updated sample file for playing video in Flash CS4 with OSMF Sprint 9: http://is.gd/7J8Al

While I've been away from the blog in the past several weeks, it seems that there have been two iterations of the Open Source Media Framework -- the last course I wrote was in OSMF7 and now we're at 9.

And, of course, between these two versions, the sample code in my courses posted at Adobe has become unusable.

After getting a few email requests from developers, I decided tonight to sit down and update the files for the first course -- the course in building a progressive video player in OSMF.

So, if you would like, you can get that update here.

The primary difference is that basically EVERY EVENT has changed names and types. So I had to hunt them down through the documentation, one at a time -- which I did. And also, they changed the name of the media player instance -- again -- this time, to 'media' (nee 'player', nee 'element').

Please note that I didn't really update the comments to reflect the changes to the event names and locations.

And if you're all very, very, very nice, I might consider updating the files for the Dynamic Multibitrate Streaming Player also

Share and enjoy!

-r

My new online video course on Dynamic Multi-bitrate Streaming with Adobe Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) has just gone live on Adobe Developer Connection.

It's 35 minutes across five lessons and takes you through the process of converting the progressive OSMF video player (which we create in the first installment of this course on Building Progressive Video Players with Adobe OSMF, into a dynamic multi-bitrate streaming player. Multi-bitrate streaming occurs when you program your Flash to deliver the highest quality video a viewer can see (dependent on their bandwidth). *Dynamic* multi-bitrate streaming is similar, with the additional feature of having your player constantly meters the bandwidth throughout viewing, to adjust the playback between multiple videos seamlessly, as the viewer's bandwidth may fluctuate.

Please note: that the first course on progressive video players was built with OSMF Sprint 5. The second course on streaming with OSMF was built with OSMF Sprint 7. I spend the first lesson of the new course updating the progressive player to work with Sprint 7, and I wrote a few notes about the major differences between OSMF 0.5 and 0.7 in a post on this blog last month. Also note that, by the time the course was published by Adobe, OSMF had already moved forward to Spring 8.

When I wrote the first course on building a progressive video player with OSMF, I was struck by two things:
1) OSMF is clean -- really clean -- and it just works well in ways that the AS3 video API does not -- for instance, with OSMF setting volume is a matter of talking to the volume property of the MediaPlayer
2) OSMF felt like a bit of overkill -- you need a lot of imports and classes (a MediaPlayer, a MediaElement, a NetLoader and a URLResource) just to build the simplest of progressive video players -- that would be simple enough, requiring seven lines of code with raw AS3 if you knew it

But, I had a hunch that #2 above was due to the fact that I was using approximately 0.05% of this powerful framework -- like trying to use a nuclear bomb when a shovel would do just fine.

Well, when I started learning how to write the code to build dynamic multi-bitrate streaming player, I quickly learned that my hunch was right. The benefits of OSMF really kick in once you do anything beyond the most basic video player.

In the case of streaming, to convert your progressive OSMF video player to a streaming OSMF video player, all you do is change the URL! Seriously, that's it. OSMF is smart enough to know that when you try to load a video from an RTMP server, you're trying to stream -- and it takes care of the rest.

That was pretty neat. But the benefits really kicked in when I beefed my regular streaming OSMF video player to one that supports dynamic multi-bitrate streaming. All it took was just a few extra lines of code to turn my regular video player into one that supports dynamic multi-bitrate streaming. If you want to learn those lines of code, I'd recommend checking out the course.

As I say, I'm still just barely cracking the surface of OSMF, and I'm really looking forward to digging deeper into its support for layouts, playlists and monetization. But, even with this second course, the massive time, workflow and standardization features of OSMF are already revealing themselves.

Share and enjoy!

-r

rblank9: new free 35min video training on Multibitrate Streaming with OSMF (with src files) posted at Adobe Dev Ctr http://is.gd/5wDlN

rblank9: new talk announced for FITC Toronto in April. 'Standardize Your Flash with OSMF' http://is.gd/5sFsC See you up north!

I've started work on the next installment of my training on the Adobe Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) (following my course on building a progressive video player with OSMF, published last month). And in the roughly 6 weeks since I built the code for the last course (using OSMF 0.5), we've seen two revs of the OSMF codebase, which is now in rev 7.

The framework is definitely more solid now, but, since it's still 'beta', they continue to shift things under the hood. [Read more →]

I have recently completed a course on working with the Adobe Open Source Media Framework. Introduction to the Adobe Open Source Media Framework for Flash, which is 90 minutes of video-based online training, has been posted to the Adobe Developer Connection, and to the Rich Media Institute.

OSMF is relatively new, and if you haven't yet heard about it, you should check it out. I have been building video players in Flash for over eight years, and almost no two players are ever built the same way. OSMF is an attempt at standardizing the way that such players are built into Flash. Incorporating basic functionality (which we cover in this course), as well as more advanced behaviors like playlists, overlays and integrated advertising, OSMF is a set of classes available for Flash Platform development.

In this course, we cover the basics of working with OSMF in Adobe Flash CS4 -- coding on the timeline to build a fully-functional video player, step-by-step.

And, of course, it's FREE, so you really don't have an excuse. Check it out!

Title: Introduction to the Adobe Open Source Media Framework for Flash
Duration: 90 minutes
Price: FREE
View Course at Adobe Developer Connection
View Course at the Rich Media Institute (eligible for certificate of completion)
Description: This course covers all the basic functionality and concepts required to build progressive video players in Flash CS4 with the Adobe Open Source Media Framework. We start from the basics, and work our way to a fully-functioning video player, authored from scratch, using OSMF and Flash CS4.

OSMF is Adobe's community-centered approach to standardizing the way that media players (and, in particular, video players) are built on the Adobe Flash Platform. Although still in prelease, OSMF encompasses media playback functionality, playlists, branding, advertising, and other monetization aspects, and represents a powerful and comprehensive attempt to standardize a huge portion of the work currently executed in Flash.

Who this Course is For: This course is useful for two sets of students looking to get up to speed with OSMF:

• Low-to-intermediate level Flash ActionScripters, comfortable coding on the timeline, who want to learn the raw ActionScript, as well as the underlying concepts, required to work with OSMF
• Higher level coders, using Adobe Flash or Flex, who want a quick run-down of the core classes utilized when building an OSMF video player

Outline:

• Introduction: Brief Overview of OSMF and Installing the SWC ( 5:44 )
• Lesson 1 : Basics of Video Playback with OSMF ( 6:46 )
• Lesson 2 : Handling Changes in View State ( 7:04 )
• Lesson 3: Adding a Pause Toggle Button ( 8:55 )
• Lesson 4: Sizing the Video ( 9:56 )
• Lesson 5: Adding Volume Control ( 5:56 )
• Lesson 6: Adding a Progress Bar ( 13:58 )
• Lesson 7: Adding Seek Functionality ( 10:43 )
• Lesson 8: Cleaning Up After a Video ( 8:26 )
• Lesson 9 : Playing Multiple Videos ( 11:05 )