webfraggle » Adobe Flash Platform

AS3 FLVPlayback smoothing the scaling.

webfraggle — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 10:33:35 +0000

I searched a little while, found only AS2 workarounds, but here is the AS3 version of interpolated, smooth video scaling of a FLVPlayback.

//playback is your FLVplayback instance playback.getVideoPlayer(playback.activeVideoPlayerIndex).smoothing = true;

I use it after the ready event was send.

Encode and deliver MP4 Video for Flash, iPhone, iPad, Android, Quicktime with timeshift possibility

webfraggle — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 20:30:42 +0000

A big challenge was to find a solution to encode and deliver videos for as much platforms as possible. The only thing that was clear I had to use mpeg4 for max. compatibility.

Initial Position: We have many PAL videos with up to 20 different languages. All are around an hour. They are organized in chapters.

Client needs:

Multilanguage
Timeshift / Pseudo-streaming / Random access to jump directly to a chapter
Two different bandwidths
Maximum quality
Download security
Platforms: Desktop (Flash), iPhone, iPad, Android and maybe more in the future

My main thought was, ok, many of the features needed will work with Adobes Flash Media Server. But how can I deliver skippable video to iDevices with the same comfort. And another challenge was the client’s network. It’s a big company so they have a firewall and a proxy with a strong content filter.

Server possibilities:

Flash Media Server (rtmp and rtmpt via http tunneling, easy install, works out of the box)
red5 (rtmp, not so easy to configure, java knowledge needed)
Webserver only (http progressive download no skipping)
xmoovstream (http, php script, random access for iDevices but not for mp4 in combination with flash)
H264 streaming extension by trac for a variety of webservers (http, pseudo-streaming mp4 video for Flash and iDevices)

After some tests I made my decision to use Flash Media Server with the bundled Apache webserver extended by the h264 streaming extension. This works fine for all purposes and is in my opinion the best and easiest combination of rtmp and http with skipping directly into the video without loading it completely, I think it’s also called random access. And the best, you only need to store your files once on the server.

And now to the encoding part. It must be a fast encoding because we have many different audio languages, the video track is almost the same. The only way to do this, is the possibility to encode the video separately from the audio and muxing it together.

Encoding possibilities:

Adobe Media Encoder (Good encoding quality, No muxing (maybe it can be done with external tools), sometimes the videos will not play on iDevices, Flash needs to be installed on the encoding computer)
Sorenson Squeeze (No muxing(maybe it can be done with external tools), didn’t find any good quality encoding settings)
ffmpeg in combination with mp4box (Good encoding quality, muxing possible, nothing needs to be installed on the encoding computer, just put the binaries, a batch file and the source files on the network or a external hard-drive and go)

It’s clear, that I used the last one. If you want to use it too, just google for some binaries for your operating system. Important is that you find a ffmpeg version with libx264 included.

Encoding settings:

Both are two pass encoding settings for best quality

High Quality (Video & Audio) – Flash, iPad, Quicktime (not on iPhone because this uses a better h264 profile the iPhone can’t play) maybe iPhone 4:

Pass 1;
ffmpeg -y -i in.avi -pass 1 -vcodec libx264 -b 750k -g 300 -bf 3 -refs 6 -b_strategy 1 -coder 1 -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -sc_threshold 40 -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -me_range 16 -me_method umh -subq 7 -i_qfactor 0.71 -qcomp 0.6 -qdiff 4 -directpred 3 -flags2 +dct8x8+wpred+bpyramid+mixed_refs -trellis 1 -partitions +parti8x8+parti4x4+partp8x8+partp4x4+partb8x8 -acodec libfaac -ab 64k out-high.mp4

Pass 2:
ffmpeg -y -i in.avi -pass 2 -vcodec libx264 -b 750k -g 300 -bf 3 -refs 6 -b_strategy 1 -coder 1 -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -sc_threshold 40 -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -me_range 16 -me_method umh -subq 7 -i_qfactor 0.71 -qcomp 0.6 -qdiff 4 -directpred 3 -flags2 +dct8x8+wpred+bpyramid+mixed_refs -trellis 1 -partitions +parti8x8+parti4x4+partp8x8+partp4x4+partb8x8 -acodec libfaac -ab 64k out-high.mp4

Low Quality (Video & Audio) (works on all platforms):

Pass 1:
ffmpeg -y -i in.avi -pass 1 -s 384x288 -vcodec libx264 -b 230k -flags +loop+mv4 -cmp 256 -partitions +parti4x4+parti8x8+partp4x4+partp8x8+partb8x8 -me_method hex -subq 7 -trellis 1 -refs 5 -bf 0 -flags2 +mixed_refs -coder 0 -me_range 16 -g 250 -keyint_min 25 -sc_threshold 40 -i_qfactor 0.71 -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -qdiff 4 -acodec libfaac -ab 32k -ac 1 out-low.mp4

Pass 2:
ffmpeg -y -i in.avi -pass 2 -s 384x288 -vcodec libx264 -b 230k -flags +loop+mv4 -cmp 256 -partitions +parti4x4+parti8x8+partp4x4+partp8x8+partb8x8 -me_method hex -subq 7 -trellis 1 -refs 5 -bf 0 -flags2 +mixed_refs -coder 0 -me_range 16 -g 250 -keyint_min 25 -sc_threshold 40 -i_qfactor 0.71 -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -qdiff 4 -acodec libfaac -ab 32k -ac 1 out-low.mp4

Adding the needed hinting stream and interleaving the stream in chunks (same for both):

mp4box -inter 500 -hint out-high.mp4 mp4box -inter 500 -hint out-low.mp4

Audio only encoding

ffmpeg -y -i "audio-lc.wav" -acodec libfaac -ab 64k -ac 1 audio-lc-64.m4a ffmpeg -y -i "audio-lc.wav" -acodec libfaac -ab 32k -ac 1 audio-lc-32.m4a

Muxing Audio and Video together

mp4box -add audio-lc-32.m4a#audio out-low-lc.mp4 mp4box -add out-low.mp4#video out-low-lc.mp4 mp4box -inter 500 -hint out-low-lc.mp4 mp4box -add audio-lc-64.m4a#audio out-high-lc.mp4 mp4box -add out-high.mp4#video out-high-lc.mp4 mp4box -inter 500 -hint out-high-lc.mp4

A good player to test all this is the jw player. It is also available as html5 beta version so you can also try it on an iPad.

We are developing our own player because we need some special features like chaptermenus and subtitles.

Hope this can help someone. If you have some questions just ask in comments.

I’m very happy…

webfraggle — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 20:46:36 +0000

…because Serge Jespers an Adobe platform evangelist likes my work and wrote a short article about my Dräger Carina® on Multi-screen video.

Simulations of medical devices on touch devices, multi-screen publishing (Desktop, iPhone, iPad, Android …)

webfraggle — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 20:29:00 +0000

At innovation mecom, where I’m employed, we developed a simulation for training and marketing of a Dräger NIV ventilator called Carina®. It’s a small handy device to ventilate patients in hospitals. This Flash AS3 simulation reproduces all functions of the real device. So it is possible to get a real good impression of it even without using a real device.

The online version of this trainer can be found here.

I did the coding of this simulation and I thought it would be an amazing experience to use this on an iPhone or another touch device.

But there is no flash on Apples iDevices. So, the first time I heard about that Adobe will integrate an iPhone packager in his Flash CS5 version I was very happy and curious about it. I couldn’t wait for that version to try it. But then, short time before the CS5 release, Steve Jobs changed his terms and conditions. He integrated only one sentence which made me sad again. Because of that sentence it is not allowed to submit apps to the app store not developed with Xcode.

But Adobe released the iPhone packager anyway and I was able to do some tests with it even if I never will submit a Flash App to the Apple Store. But Adobe was not sleeping. They did an alliance with all other mobile device manufactures. They call it the Open Screen Project. And the first result is the Flash Player 10.1 for Android 2.2 devices. So in the near future many Android and Flash enabled touch devices will come to the market.

And here is the result of my first studies with the iPhone and Android packager.
I just had to reposition some buttons because of the smaller resolution and packaged it with the iPhone packager in Flash CS5. This worked great and the result was amazingly good.

Next thing was to try it on Android. I registered for the developer beta program at adobe and tried the android packager for CS5. This works also very fine. Unfortunately I didn’t own an Android device so I had to use the virtual simulator which is really slow on my notebook. But the main thing is, that it works also without any bigger adaptions. And last week I got an iPad. And needless to say, I tried the carina app there too. It’s just a scaled iPhone version but the feeling of using it is really really good. I think it is not possible to get it nearer to a real ventilation device.

Here is a short video of the results trying publishing Flash on multiple devices (Browser, iPhone, iPad and the Android Simulator).

So I’m really curious about what Adobe does next. They announced an Android tablet with Flash Player and AIR. And then we get so much new and amazing possibilities using multitouch devices for simulating medical devices for training.

Cool 3D Demo with AIR on Android

webfraggle — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 07:46:12 +0000

xmoovStream, php Streaming Server

webfraggle — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:14:21 +0000

Ich habe den xmoovStream Server von Eric getestet und finde, dass das Teil ziemliches Potenzial hat. Wer selbst mal probieren will, kann es auf meinen meinem Server http://stream.xplore-it.com/xsexamples, oder auch auf dem xmoovStream Server tun.

Ich wurde auch dankend erwähnt

Windows 7 + Flex +Multitouch

webfraggle — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 08:16:00 +0000

Ich freue mich schon drauf, obwohl ich mir wohl erst mal einen Mac kaufen werde.

$1 Recognizer for Flash Actionscript

webfraggle — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 09:32:34 +0000

While my research for a gesture, pattern or dwt recognition algorithm for recognizing movements of the wiimote’s accelerometers I found this amazing small but accurate “$1 Gesture Recognizer in JavaScript“. Because it works great I converted it into Actionscript for Flash. Here you can test it and download the source:

Source
Download Source: DollarFlashGestures.zip

More Information
Project Page:
$1 Gesture Recognizer – Examples and Source (Javascript, Actionscript, and C#)

A PDF by Jacob O. Wobbrock, Andrew D. Wilson and Yang Li where they explained DollarFlashGestures.zipalgorithm:
Gestures without Libraries, Toolkits or Training:
A $1 Recognizer for User Interface Prototypes

Augmented Reality

webfraggle — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:39:51 +0000

Was ist es?
Ich denke ein Beispiel sagt mehr als tausend Worte

Und hier ein erstes kleines Tutorial in Englisch, da der Entwickler des FLARToolkit großteils Japanisch dokumentiert.

Ich denke daran werde ich es demnächst auch mal selbst probieren.

GSAK2iPhone First Public Beta

webfraggle — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 19:09:50 +0000

Today I released my GSAK2iPhone tool, which I first coded only for myself. But maybe someone out there in the big geocaching family will find it usefull.

GSAK2iPhone