Flash on 3d

October 5, 2007

I’m currently more convinced than ever that FMS 3 is the way forward. here are two questions I need to sort out though:

  1. Flash support – how are tickets supported? Is it really £100 per ticket?
  2. Is H.264 broadcasing with FME subject to MPEG-LA licensing payment?
  3. Do we need Flix? Platform?

Hope these points don’t scupper my enthusiasm for all things Flash!

I’ve been uploading the IWMW videos into Google Video at 640×480 (H.264 MPEG-4), a reasonable resolution suitable for Apple TV, and was shocked to find it streamed back at me at 320×240 – half the resolution. This is fine for an iPod where you expect to be squinting, and for your average home video this might be reasonable, but for side-by-side video of presenter and screen on a laptop it looks blurry and cheap.

Apparently if you download from Google Video you get slightly better resolution. Still not the original quality though. More like what you’d get on a iPhone/iPod Touch. Unfortunately, though I’ve specified that these videos can be downloaded, am I getting a download link? Not on your nelly. The sooner we implement interactive screen/presenter switching on our streams, and get people to see what we’ve recorded at full quality, the better.

Adobe has announced Flash Media Server 3. Flashcomguru point to a cool recorded session discussing it at the anouncement. Find the FMS presentation by Kevin Towes. This follows the recent announcement of Flash Player 9.

Seriously those recorded sessions are cool! :-) Nice to see the interactive switching between presenter and screen, something I’d like to do with our videos. Google video will never do that!

FMS3 and Flash Player 9 will do H.264 and better security. Long story short it’s game over for ON2 VP6 and Real Helix, I think.

This is a first

September 13, 2007

Actually it’s not. I’ve started blogs a few times before, and each time I say to myself, grandly, “this time it will be different.” Ahem…

I work as a Systems Integrator at the University of York, UK. Although this blog is intended to cover work-related items, it reflects my own personal opinions and interests, and not those of the University I work for. Indeed I’ll try to refrain from discussing University of York projects directly if at all possible.

Over time topics should include:

  • e-learning
  • library systems
  • video
  • web 2.0
  • java
  • standards