A few weeks ago FMS 4.5 was released. While reading through the system requirements it stated once again that it only supported running on Windows, Redhat and CentOS. Unfortunately for me I only develop on a mac and a ubuntu machine. In the past I had to use a script from this blog post to get FMS 3.5 installed.
So I decided to give it a try. To see if I could in fact get the server up and running on my ubuntu machine. To my surprise, the standard install scripts worked flawlessly.
Here are the steps:
- Download the development server
- unzip FlashMediaDevServer_4_5_all.zip
- cd [path_to_unzipped_files]/linux
- tar -zxvf FlashMediaServer4.5_x64.tar.gz
- cd FMS_4_5_0_r297
- sudo ./installFMS
- follow the onscreen instructions
- point your browser to your machines IP address.

Back a few months ago at max. BlackBerry announced they would be giving away free PlayBooks to developers who develop an application for their platform. I for one am all about free stuff. So I set out to develop a tool that I thought would be useful and I would use regularly. The app I decided to create was a programming calculator.
Today the application is finally complete and has been accepted into the app store.
While creating this app I used the latest version of Flash Builder Burrito. I found it a lot easier to use vs Flash Builder 4. The new built-in mobile wizards and device simulators were very helpful. Also the flex framework really worked great with layout and positioning as it always does. The only real gotcha with flex was how skinning works on mobile devices vs desktop apps. Everything else was a breeze.
Thanks Adobe and Blackberry for making such great tools that work!
So over the weekend I’ve been playing around a little bit with HTTP video streaming. A lot of the newer video streaming technologies are starting to focus around HTTP + Adaptive streaming. The reason for this is because HTTP based streaming can scale very easily and Adaptive streaming can adjust very easily client restrictions such as bandwidth and hardware capabilities.
- Microsoft (Silverlight) – supports both HTTP and Adaptive streaming with their SmoothHD.
- Adobe (Flash) – supports Adaptive streaming and will be supporting HTTP streaming in FP 10.1
- Apple – supports HTTP and Adaptive streaming in Safari and on the iPhone.
- Move Networks – One of the first to support both HTTP and Adaptive streaming.
So in my attempt to better understand the world of streaming I ended up playing around with apples solution to live video streaming. Thanks to a few great articles at IONCANNON, I was able to create a little streaming application that would dynamically load video into Safari and onto the iPhone. Very cool stuff. I plan on working with what he created already and getting it to work with my other little side project.
