New job. Exciting project

There has not been much activity here lately, because I have been busy getting into my new job at FI (a.k.a www.fantasy-interactive.com)!

I am currently working on a new exciting project which will create quite a buzz in the industry. Code name ProPod is a new media blogging platform that will rock your socks off.

Presentation of Flash Player 10 aka Astro

This presentation was filmed at the MAX Chicago 2007 by Aral Balkan.
The video shows a sneek preview of some of the new features of Flash Player 10 such as the new text engine, new 3D features and the new bitmap effect scripting language called Hydra. With Hydra people can create their own custom filters in a ActionScript/C
like environment.

Flash Audio/Video updates

Most of you flashers already know about the new Flash player that support
H.264 video and AAC audio.

This is a huge step for all you who are interested in Flash and video, since producing high quality video for Flash has been limited to the ON2 VP7 codec or the older worse VP6.

Now Adobe has implemented a limited sub set of MPEG-4, 3GP and QuickTime movie support whih basically means is that instead of converting your video to VP6/FLV with FFMPEG you can progressive stream .mp4,.m4v,.m4a,.mov and .3gp files using the NetStream API you use to load FLV files now. It only need to have a .FLV file extension.

Another great thing is the support for all audio sampling rates from 8Khz to 96Khz. The old players were limited to 11Khz, 22Khz and 44.1Khz and any other would be played incorrect (slower or faster).


Read more here:
http://www.progettosinergia.com/flashvideo/flashvideoblog.htm#120907

And here:
http://www.kaourantin.net/2007/08/what-just-happened-to-video-on-web_20.html

Resize images 2.0

Everyone who work with publishing images on the web have faced a situation that you need to change the images physical proportions; height and width. I usualy open up the good ol' Photoshop and batch resize the images to the desired height and width. But what if you could resize without make the image smaller or loose information like in cropping? Well smaller ofcourse but I still want to keep that look and feel of the image but it just need to fit in my web design.

There is now a pretty cool technique called Seam Carving to help you with this.

Mario Klingeman at Quasimondo has written a great article how to use Seam Carving in Flash, and yes there is also source code available! :D

Check it out here >>

Papervision3D public Beta

Papervision3D moves from private testing to a full public beta.




Everybody is welcome to download and start playing with it. We believe you will find it very easy to use and to integrate into your Flash 8, Flash CS3 and Flex projects.

Papervision3D Components for Flash CS3

John Grden has released great Papervision component to Flash CS3
Look at the features:

* Design-time render and editing in Flash IDE

* 3 Material types supported - BitmapFileMaterial, BitmaAssetMaterial and MovieAssetMaterial

* Creates MovieScene3D and Free or Target camera

* Manages resizing / centering of Papervision3D scene [optional]

* Dynamic masking to constrain the viewable render area to the bounds of the component [optional]

* Full API and access to Scene, Camera, Collada objects to code around

* Automatically loads materials via Collada file [when materials list is not given]

* New Custom Panel for modifying rotation, camera zoom, camera focus, camera Z at design-time

New remix!

I made a new remix. This time it's P-Diddy and 666 Mafia.

Flashy drum machine

All you who are into electron music know what the Roland 909 is. This drum machine is with the 808 a legendary piece of electronics. Mostly famous for the hard beats of the Detroit house genre and is still the base for lots of techno and house tracks. The flash guru André Michelle has created a realtime 909 drum machine for you all to play around with. This is a must see (hear) for everyone that is the least interested in music and/or Flash. http://live.popforge.de/
Enjoy

Wii + Flash = WiiFlash

WiiFlash allows you to control your Flash games and applications with the revolutionary Wiimote.

It supports multiple Wiimotes, IR bar and Nunchuk and integrates very well with Papervision3D. All you need is a Bluetooth enabled PC and a Wiimote, of course.
If you want to play with it, go and get the code and subscribe to the WiiFlash mailing list.

New Red5 Version Released

There is a new version (0.6rc3) of the Open Source Red5 Flash server. This should be the last revision before the official 0.6 release which is due out in a little over a week.

The final 0.6 will be out just in time for John Grden and I to show off some really cool features of Red5 at FITC next weekend. If you are going to be at the conference please stop in. You won’t be disappointed, as they will be demonstrating some applications using midi, 3D, live multi-track recording and more.
Here are the details about the current 0.6rc3 release:

Major changes since 0.6rc2:
- Bandwidth control code completely refactored.
- Client buffering code completely refactored.
- Keyframe informations are cached so files don’t need to be reparsed
before playback.
- Connections from Flash Media Encoder and On2 Flix Live supported.
- Access to shared objects can be limited.
- Connections can provide a list of remote addresses. This is usefull
for proxied RTMPT connections.

…and of course a lot of bugs have been fixed as well. The complete
changelog can be found in the “doc” directory after the installation.

Installers:

Windows
http://dl.fancycode.com/red5/setup-red5-0.6rc3.exe
MD5: 14229425035758379df0fc24f94045

47Debian
http://dl.fancycode.com/red5/debian/0.6rc3/red5_0.6rc3-1_i386.deb
MD5: 041c4d388f3346bf435e6989cddecb1fMacOSX
http://red5.nl/installer/setup-red5-0.6rc3.dmg
http://dl.fancycode.com/red5/mac/setup-red5-0.6rc3.dmg
MD5: 4b71b3789d5e05e2b2045d14bf770229

WAR (Java 1.5)
http://dl.fancycode.com/red5/war/red5-0.6rc3-java5.war
MD5: 4d523f814580ee9fd69adad533e7bba1

WAR (Java 1.6)
http://dl.fancycode.com/red5/war/red5-0.6rc3-java6.war
MD5: 4d773cf5dabfe12c915017625c17163c

Instructions on how to install Red5 on Gentoo are available at
http://overlays.gentoo.org/dev/bangert/wiki/Red5Gentoo

A tarball for all other systems is available at
http://dl.fancycode.com/red5/red5-0.6rc3.tar.gz
MD5: 86cf3778fd4512b2bad62e5de27d6e20

Further informations as well as mirrors for the downloads soon can be
found on the official homepage at http://osflash.org/red5

Please bring any bugs you encounter to our bugtracking system at
http://jira.red5.org

If you have questions about using Red5, please subscribe to the mailing
list at http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/red5_osflash.org

The first Papervision3D Game

John Grden has released the first 3D game ever using flash, papervision3D and Red5.
This excelent game has started a new era in flash and game development. It is also exciting to see the opens-source communication server Red5 in action.

Web 2.0 The Machine is Us/ing Us Video

Adobe Flash Media Encoder

Flash Media Encoder (FME) is a free Windows desktop program that enables webcasters to stream high-quality Flash Video content to a live audience using On2's VP6 codec.
Stefan Richter has written an informative article about this program, check it out!

North Face Demo Using Papervision3D

Lee from The Flash Blog has created a supercool demo of Movies and Papervision3D
It is made with AS3, and shows incredible speed!

Video player

I've been working on a video player, so here is a sneak preview!
Right now there are two visual effects, blur and light. I',m planning on extend the visuals along the way.

Loading 3D animations

Check this amazing example of how to load a collada animation into Papervision 3D.
Tim Knip has made some great proggress in bone and skeleton animations.



The collada-file is around 5 megs, so please be patient whilst loading

Parsing all keyframes is rather cpu-intensive, after file is loaded yoy have to wait another 20 secs or so.... you may encounter the infamous script-timeout alert of the flash player...

The best song right now - Karen Overton

So you wanna get started with PV3D?

Blitz Ageny wrote a nice tutorial about how to get started with Papervision 3D.
The article explains the first step in exporting your 3d model and how to handle textures for collada export.

http://labs.blitzagency.com/?p=93

Papervision3D - Phong shading

The PV3D engine gets more and more advanced, now with Phong shading!
Check this cool exeample:

Papervision3D - Video texture!

Those guys that are working in the Papervision3D collaboration are really amazing!
Here is a really cool 3D video example of what you can do with PV3D!



The man behind this example is Paul Spitzer.

A Layman's Guide to Flash Video Conversion

From time to time most (flash)developers need to handle web-video. If you don't have the Flash IDE to convert the movie files to .FLV (flash video) you will need a thrd party software.










I have used FFMPEG for a few years and I must say that it totally rocks and there are soo many developers that are most gratefull for this FREE program.

Alx Klive, has written a great guide about converting movies to .FLV using FFMpeg.
http://www.worldtv.com/blog/guides_tutorials/flv_converter.php/