I posted four new OSMF recipes on Adobe's cookbook site this afternoon, and thought you might care to see 'em:

Playing Multiple Pieces of Media, Consecutively, with the OSMF ParallelElement
Playing Multiple Pieces of Media, Concurrently, with the OSMF ParallelElement
Dynamic Streaming with OSMF
HTTP Streaming in OSMF

And, as a reminder along these lines, I'm teaching this year at MAX, as a MAX Master, on '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

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- Linux server installation/administration experience
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- WAN experience (TCP/IP, UDP, Bind, etc)
- Java application deployment experience (Tomcat, GlassFish, J2EE, JAX-WS, etc)
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As you may know, OSMF 1.0 has been release, so one of the first tasks I set for myself was to test the code I wrote in April for OSMF 0.95 (which I posted, along with the screencasts of my talk at FITC, here). And, lo and behold, all of them worked!

Well, all except one. The final demo file, the Full Sample Player was playing, but the video was invisible and all the controls were disabled. So I set out to figure out why. (For those who don't want to read to the end, you can download the updated project file, for Flash CS5, here.)

It wasn't long before I found the culprit. It turns out that the MediaPlayer in OSMF now dispatches the 'ready' MediaPlayerStateChangeEvent when the video is ready to play for the first time — not just when it's ready to play again. So, the result of my last code sample, with OSMF 1.0, was to hide the video and disable the controls — at the start of the video playback! Not what I wanted.

So, if we just remove lines 157 and 158 (seen below), from the _onMediaPlayerStateChange function, the player will work.

case "ready":
	_disableControls ( ) ;
	_cleanUpVideo ( ) ;
	break;

But now, when our video ends, the video doesn't get reset (or 'cleaned up' or however you want to say it) — it looks ugly and doesn't behave how we would expect (because we just removed the code that's supposed to clean up these videos).

So, how do we clean up at the end of a video? Well, you can now listen for the TimeEvent.COMPLETE event on the MediaPlayer instance — when it's fired, the playback of your media is done.

So, if we add this line to the _setupOSMF() function:

_mediaPlayer.addEventListener ( TimeEvent.COMPLETE , _onComplete , false , 0 , true ) ;

…and then declare the _onComplete function, adding back in those two lines we removed from the _onMediaPlayerStateChange function:

private function _onComplete ( evt : TimeEvent ) : void
{
	_disableControls ( ) ;
	_cleanUpVideo ( ) ;
}

One final note… Adobe added in string constants for all of the MediaPlayerStateChangeEvent types, grouped in the new MediaPlayerState class. So instead of comparing against the string, "ready", you can now compare against the string constant of MediaPlayerState.READY. All of them are listed here and have been included in the updated source files that accompany this post.

See you in October at MAX in LA!

And, as always, share and enjoy!

-r

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 November!

-r

I know blogging's been light for the past several months. Work here 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 contest ended yesterday, and we picked a winner. Congratulations are in order to Kenny D. from Los Angeles, who provided the winning entry — and who will shortly receive a brand new iPad.

We're not posting Kenny's idea just yet — because we might actually use it. But, it outlined a very specific and creative implementation of Synthia as a Facebook application.

For those of you who submitted ideas, thank you very much. And to everyone, stay tuned through 2010 for further updates to Synthia!

Thank you,

-r

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.

The invitation is here and you may register here.

[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]

Share and enjoy!

-r

So I edited it down a bit (cutting out the Q&A, which unfortunately was not audible on my microphone), chopped the sections down into individual videos, and posted them to YouTube. I thought it might be a good reference if I embedded all of them in a single post, along with the source code you'll want for each lesson if you wish to follow along in Flash CS4 or CS5.

In this talk, I cover:
- what is OSMF
- OSMF capabilities
- The basic structure of an OSMF player, including the MediaElement, MediaPlayer and MediaComposition
- Dynamic Streaming (the files for that video also include HTTP Streaming)
- Subclipping
- The key MediaPlayer properties and events required to build a media player

The talk and these files all use OSMF 0.9 from Sprint 10, which you can download here.

The Slides

Part 1: Overview of Adobe OSMF

Part 2: Getting Started with OSMF in Adobe Flash

download the files to accompany this video

Part 3: Dynamic Streaming with Adobe OSMF

download the files to accompany this video

Part 4: Composite Elements in Adobe OSMF

download the files to accompany this video

Part 5: Subclipping

download the files to accompany this video

Part 6: Key MediaPlayer Properties And Events in OSMF

download the files to accompany this video

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- Flash Gaming
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- Designing medium to large scale software/hardware systems and leading other team members in the development of those systems.
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Thank you.

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