Before getting any further with this continuing discussion on Stage Video, I wanted to spend this post addressing some of the limitations that are present when working with Stage Video.

Most of these limitations follow directly from how Stage Video is rendered, by the graphics card, beneath the rest of your Flash content, as I discussed in a prior post.

1. Even when Stage Video is available, the number of concurrent instances is limited. You can have up to eight Stage Video instances concurrently playing video on the desktop, and one on mobile devices. And, of course, remember that StageVideo might not be supported at all in the viewing environment. (Yes, the AS3 API informs you of how many instances are supported. More on that in a later post.)
2. You can not freely rotate the video. Your video can only be rotated in 90-degree intervals: 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees.
3. You can not apply 3D, color, scale9Grid or skewing transformations.
4. Stage Video instances may not have alpha channel effects, blend modes, filters, or masks.
5. Access the BitmapData of the video, cache the video as a bitmap.
6. Use Stage Video with video that is embedded in your Flash source (Stage Video only works with video delivered over the NetStream).

And, this is not a limitation so much as a best-practice: Because you should set your WMODE to "direct" to maximize the cross-platform consistency of Stage Video (just like Stage 3D), this means that you should not use Stage Video with transparent SWFs.

Finally, I want to note that while Stage Video is available in most current versions of the Flash runtimes, it is not available in all. Stage Video is still not incorporated into AIR 3 for desktop (Mac or PC), and does not work on versions of Android prior to Honeycomb. On the BlackBerry Playbook, regular Video is treated like StageVideo.

Did I miss any of the limitations to note when working with StageVideo in Adobe Flash Player? If so, please let me know in comments.

Share and enjoy!

-r