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Re: FLVPlayback control not working across the internet

by Walter Tak :: Rate this Message:

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AS3 FLVPlayback doesn't work , for me , with Red5. Don't ask me why ; I normally build all videoplayers in Flash from scratch however 2 weeks ago I though ; hey let's give the good olf FLVPlayback a go.

Well after half a day of effortless trying to get the damn component to work I gave up. It doesn't even give decent events if it can , or cannot , connect to a (RTMP) server so I ditched it.

Fortunately it's not too hard to create your own video-component, it's afterall just a video-object, a scrubbar and a few buttons. The plus is that you can skin it the way you like.

Building players in Flash with AS3 is a breeze, if you know Actionscript 3. I would not invest in AS2 (code, knowledge) anymore since AS3 is all over the place (everyone has Flash player 9 or above) and it's so much more performant. Besides that code with AS3 is at least to say, a little bit cleaner than most procedural AS2 spaghetti code.

If you want to limit coding you could try the JW player ; http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/jw-flv-player/ ; it's more or less becoming a standard player for Flash even though I don't really love the move from open-source to closed-source and their licenses, however the player works fine.

One thing regarding jumping ; if you have VOD files then they need to have enough keyframes to provide accurate seeking. If your videos run at 25 fps and you'd put in a keyframe once per 50 frames then Red5 can only seek to positions with a 2 second accuracy. E.g. position 0 sec, 2 sec, 4 sec etc.

If you playback live recorded streams (Flash player > webcam > stream to Red5 > record) then those videos are known for their very weird behaviour regarding seeking. Especially if those files are short (e.g. below 20 seconds).

Last but not least don't forget to use a decent client-side playback-buffer, say 2-10 seconds. That way videos wont play back too jerky in case your client doesn't have a very steady connection to the net (e.g. when using a wireless connection on a laptop or a mobile connection with HSDPA / GPRS).

Walter

----- Original Message -----

From: davids@...

To: red5@...

Sent: Wednesday, 01 July 2009 06:16

Subject: [Red5] FLVPlayback control not working across the internet

Hi,

I sent the message below over a week ago and there has been no response.

There must be a heap of Red5 people playing back stored FLV files. Lets share some of our experience.

So if you can please tell me what you are using on the client side and whether you have found a satisfactory solution ....

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I have been trying to play back stored FLV files using rtmp from a Red5 server.

If I do it inside my own network I can play the files without a glitch using an application based around the Flash FLVPlayback component written in AS2. However when I try to play them over the internet the behaviour is very erratic. It appears as though the component has not been designed to be used with a streaming server.

Using the cursor to seek to a position in the video often fails with the cursor jumping back to the beginning of the file. No event errors are reported from the FLVPLayBack control so there appears to be nothing that I can specifically do to deal with this misbehaviour.

I am getting very frustrated with using this component because it does not seem to be possible to get the component to behave consistently and reliably when used over the internet.

I would appreciate some advice as to whether what I am trying to do is achievable or not. There have been issues/concerns raised over the use of the FLVPlayback control with Red5. I am not seeing any issues/errors on the server side so I have been assuming that the problem is just with the client.

Hopefully there is somebody out there with some experience to share? Or perhaps a suggestion to try something else?

Regards,

David Schulberg

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