Streaming Media - August/September 2007 - (Page 55)

will provide video aggregation, digital rights management, and access to local FLV files, among other yet-undisclosed features. It’s basically like iTunes for video. Adobe says there will be opportunities to brand and customize this application as well. TAKIN’ IT TO THE BIG SCREEN button (e.g.,SkinOverAll or SkinUnderAll) and specify your source video. Step Four: In your document publish settings (File > Publish Settings), click the HTML tab. Choose Flash with Full Screen Support from the Template drop-down menu. This will create a required external JavaScript file and add some special tags to your HTML document. Step Five: Publish your SWF and click on the full-screen toggle button to view your video on the big screen. As you may know, in the Flash 8 Player and above, it’s possible for an entire SWF to enter fullscreen mode. But did you know that in Flash 9 Player and above, it’s possible for the FLVPlayback component itself to go full-screen? Let’s see how it’s done. Step One: Drag an FLVPlayback component onto the stage. Step Two: In the Parameters panel, set the align property to Center and the scaleMode to maintainAspectRatio. Step Three Choose a skin that has a full-screen toggle When the stage enters full-screen mode, the FLVPlayback component covers the other content in the SWF and takes over the whole screen. When the viewer hits the Escape button to exit full-screen mode,the SWF returns to its normal layout. Where Do I Go From Here? There are a number of books and websites that can FLV 101: Whenever you are working with code, it’s always best to try to understand exactly what it’s doing—especially if you didn’t write it yourself. Let’s do a little recap of two basic objects that we need in our video applications and explain just what they do. WHAT IS A NETCONNECTION? A NetConnection is used for both streaming and progressive video delivery. It lets Flash know whether you’re using progressive download or streaming, and if it’s streaming, it specifies where your Flash Media Server is and what application to connect to. For example, for progressive, your NetConnection code would look like this: NetStream and NetConnection var nc:NetConnection = new NetConnection(); nc.connect(null); See, if you pass null as the argument, Flash delivers your FLV as progressive download. If you’re streaming your video, your NetConnection code would look like this: var nc:NetConnection = new NetConnection(); nc.connect(“rtmp://yourFMSserver.com/AppName/InstanceName”); Here you’re specifying that Flash should connect via RTMP protocol to a Flash Media Server. You need to specify the host name that FMS is running on, the application you wish to connect to, and the instance name that your FLV files are associated with. That’s basically all the NetConnection does. By itself, it doesn’t play videos—you’ll need to bring in a NetStream for that. WHAT IS A NETSTREAM? The NetStream class gives you the power to play FLV files from the local file system, from a web address, or streaming from FMS. The NetStream plays the FLV through the NetConnection object. You’d instantiate it like this: var ns = new NetStream(nc); myVideo.attachVideo(ns); ns.play(“yourVideo.flv”); In this example, “nc” is our NetConnection object, and “myVideo” is a video object that you want to use to display your FLV. This would be the same for progressive or streaming. So,that’s it—that’s all there is to NetStreams and NetConnections. Well, it’s a good overview, anyway. There are many built-in functions that you can access through the NetStream and NetConnection object, but we’ll reserve the details of those for another day. WWW.STREAMINGMEDIA.COM 55 http://WWW.STREAMINGMEDIA.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Streaming Media - August/September 2007

Table of Contents Sweet Sixteen Letters to the Editor Technology and Business Trends IBM Takes Webcasting to the Desktop ROI in the EDU Bank Serves Espresso, Enterprise Video Online Video Advertising: Hit or Miss MLB’s Foul Bawl A Crash Course in Flash Video Newspapers in Multimedia Metamorphosis Webcasting Large Entertainment Events: Seeing Through the Hype Webcasting With Windows Media Can’t Start A Fire . . . A WiMAX Primer Mobile Video at Last Telestream Episode Pro Grass Valley ProCoder 3 Silverlight Is No Flash Killer

Streaming Media - August/September 2007

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