Playing around with Adobe multimedia streaming
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- Created on Thursday, 23 June 2011 21:55
- Last Updated on Wednesday, 29 June 2011 00:16
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Recently at work I had to examine some problems with Adobe proprietary multimedia streaming standard – RTMP. It turned out that this is quite popular streaming standard around the web. I performed some experiments on our embedded platforms with Adobe Flash and Action Script 2.0 which turned out not to be so hard. My next natural step was to write my own RTMP Flash player. At first I thought that the right solution would be to compile my players using the newest Adobe Flash 10 and Action Script 3.0. It turned out that Action Script 3.0 is a strictly typed programming language – which is quite positive. Unfortunately most API’s that are used in Action Script 2.0 were changed in AS 3.0 and I had one basic player already written in AS 2.0 for my embedded platform. This was the reason why I decided to use AS 2.0 and compile my player using Adobe Flash 8. This is not the newest standard but more web users will be able to see it. AS 2 is based on ECMAScript 3 standard and AS 3 is based somewhere in between ECMAScript 3 and ECMAScript 5.
For testing my RTMP players I needed some free streams. It turned out that there are many free web cams around the world, that uses either Adobe Flash Media Server or Wowoza server to stream multimedia using RTMP protocol. There was noting else for me to do than just plug-in 
As an example streams I used free live streams from Niagara Falls and Amsterdam which are quite impressive. See for yourself – Live Cams. If you’re unable to see streams it could mean that either your Flash Plugin version is lower than 8 (which is rather unlikely to happen) or that you don’t have Flash Plugin installed at all. There will be some direct links to use that allow you to download Adobe Flash Plugin. You will be able to have good user experience with those streams with Internet connection bandwidth equal to 1Mb/s or faster.