Here’s some videos made up of frames taken over NYE 06>07 from Aberdeen Council’s 3 webcams.
A little php script grabbed an image each minute and numerically numbered them to make it easy to import as an image sequence into flash video encoder. The ON2 codec allows for quite a big image at 15 frames per second at a reasonable bandwidth (440kbps), albeit with not much movement happening to cause video break up.
I might extend the script further to automatically grab sun-up/sun-down times from the bbc’s weather xml feed, then punt the resulting images into a short video clips courtesy of ffmpeg or similar, though I guess fading in a grey image in the background would do for 90% of the time in Aberdeen.
When you have multiple swfs on stage, or (as is becoming more common with increased firefox and ie7 use- across multiple browser tabs) then the last thing you want is multiple mp3 audio players or video players all banging away at once creating a racket. This is when the flash localConnection class is your friend, it allows inter-swf communication. In the following simple example there is one ‘controller’ swf and a few ‘player’ swfs that only allow one to be active at any time.
Apollo is a new cross-platform development product from Adobe targetted at leveraging web development skills onto the desktop. Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript & Ajax skills will all be able to be integrated into apollo applications.
In keeping with Adobe’s recently more open policy like with Adobe Flex, the public alpha is available at the labs website, and it’s been announced that the sdk and compiler will be available for free, enabling more users to experience and build applications with this tool.
I’ll be interested to see how other vendors of tools in this area respond – I’ve been a fan of multidmedias zinc for rapid interactive application development, it utilises flash and extends it with many features you need on the desktop or for cd-rom, but while it is feature rich I’ve found it can sometimes be buggy and of course to use it cross platform requires an additional licence.
I suspect this may well become the defacto standard in the field, I can think of a heap of applications such as branded audio/video/messaging/games/viral widgets that’ll benefit from the speed and capabilities of actionscript 3.0 combined with the desktop system and network connectivity that apollo enables.
gotswf.com is new search engine for flash developers, searching flash blogs, the adobe flash /flex / flash media server livedocs (a lot handier than trawling through liveodcs notoriously slow interface)
Also handy actionscriptclasses.com home for a good collection of links to actionscript classes available around the web, and http://proto.layer51.com a good depository of older prototypes.
It seems like it’s been part of the fabric of the internet now for ages but in reality the mass acceptance of video use in webpages didn’t occur until early 2006 with the likes of Youtube gaining the publics attention, coinciding with a massive public uptake in broadband connectivity.
Now many people want the capability to add videos easily to their site .. but this demand for that technical capability is often not matched by an understanding of the potential difficulties in implementation, particularly when faced with limited resources in development or hosting provision. The variety of sources which produce video, from 100’s of mobile phone models to webcams to dv-cams, combined with different operating systems, software, codecs etc could potentially be confusing. So how do video sites deal with the all the potential options in their user input?
The battle for the dominant format for web video consumption has been won – Flash video scores very highly on cross platform capabilities, browser compatability and general public ubiquity and acceptance. It also is highly maleable in its ability to be integrated into customised interfaces and branded scenarios unlike more traditional video contenders such as quicktime and windows media, which are more suited when the use case of the media is to be downloaded and viewed on the desktop rather than embedded within a web page.
To convert user uploads to flash video (flv) we have a number of options – we could use Sorenson Squeeze installed on a (windows) server and use its ‘watch folder’ capability to convert files, or similar products such as On2 Flix SDK. These work great ‘out of the box’ but incur ongoing licence fees that are quite expensive except if you are using them at an enterprise level.
On the other hand FFMPEG is an entirely free and open source library that will convert many popular video file formats to flv, but it does require more developer effort to get to a useable solution. Like many open source projects it has its foibles (the documentation is scattered and patchy, the mailing list obtuse and unhelpful, there are complications brought by dependance on other external libraries) but if you persevere you can create a cross platform application that can be hosted on windows or linux servers without any licence fee cost.
The first step in creating a solution is to visualise the processes involved:
upload file-> analyse format of uploaded file -> convert to flv -> display
In stage 2 I’ll describe how to implement these stages using php, an ffmpeg binary and a flash video player.
I saw a post in Sitepoint’s flash forum looking for a ‘clouds circulating a planet look’. I’d pondered this problem in creating shiny ‘pearls’ for a navigational device for this site – how to create a good illusion of shinyness – In this case I did it by simulating a ‘reflection map’ (the environment around the viewer reflected off the object). I accomplished this by using the Flash 8 BitmapData class Perlin Noise method which creates noise based patterns, then mapped it to a spherical surface using the displacementMapFilter. A couple of extra lines of code using threshold to eliminate some of the darker ‘clouds’ and I think we have created a useful imitation of orbiting clouds. for the swf below (Click the sphere to swap to the different method).
If you use perlin noise to fill a larger area and are generating it per frame, it’s an idea to copy as much imagery as needed to a bitmap with the stitch parameter set to true (so it can loop easily), this will free up some cpu, particularly if you’re using a lot of octaves in the noise generation.