Flash Coder

Roll up, roll up. No not you sir. The excellent Flash and Flex Developer magazine that I semi regularly bang on about is now releasing back issues free on line. Their content is truly great, covering less for the beginner and instead catering for the more experienced developers amongst us. Take a look at the content synopsis on the cover or any issue and you’ll definitely find something more advanced that you wanted to learn.

June issue Free for Download now
http://www.ffdmag.com/prt/view/back-issues/issue/1015.html

IPTV Player in Flash / Flex part 2.

This looks certain to be the next step in the evolution of Flash and Flex as an IPTV solution. As an AS developer trying to create a working, near end-2-end IPTV system, some of the information revealed in the videos in particular is exactly what we want to hear.

If, like me, you use video quite a bit in your projects, and I don’t just mean FLVs, (perhaps you use media directly, passing it to the devices native codecs or perhaps you need original codec footage to transcode to FLV) then a really useful resource would be an online library of all video and audio codecs with example files for each. This would allow you not only to test out the codecs and your code but also save you a LOT of time trying to resource media files in the right format or trying to encode or transcode existing ones for testing. It would also give you insight to other available codecs you’d never heard of and it might summarise their strengths, uses and weakneses, thus allowing you to advise your clients better on their codec choices.

Ahhhh, that would be nice. Well, Wikipedia have just such a section. It also has a section for audio codecs (in the left hand menu). So if you do any broadcast, media agency, Flash Media Server or IPTV work, this is a definate Bookmarker. In fairness, there probably are a few codecs missing, but it’s extremely unlikely they’ll be codecs any of us have ever heard about or will use. A big thank you to Richard Leggett for pointing me (and all the attendees of the LFPUG) to this excellent resource on Thursday night. I WILL be using this a lot.

ok, I won’t bore you with the details as they’re on the site, but briefly, this has the new licencing model and it fixes a number of bugs (though obviously there are still some known issues.

Now, go get it. Unless you don’t already have it, in which case, go get the FMS install version, then go get the update

The announcement is out. The new version of FCS - Flash Media Server 2 is due to be released in October, with the public Beta due this month (sometime). There are some significant improvements and new capabilities that truly make this a Media Server (and probably hence the change in name), amongst these are Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times: Shooting Video Hands-Free. Paws-Free, Too.