My company Atomik Studios is currently developing RIAs for the streaming services of a fortune 500 technology company. One of the requirements is support for H.264 video and the RTSP streaming protocol, which limits our options to AJAX with a video playback plug-in, maybe Silverlight? Last week Adobe announced Flash Player 9 Beta supporting H.264 video (more info on labs.adobe.com), which gives us a new option: Flash!

I tested the new Flash Player a bit and I could play H.264 mp4 files in progressive mode, but I didn't manage to play video over the RTSP protocol.

Adobe will support streaming H.264 video over their Flash Media Server, but I don't know if we will be able to stream from other streaming servers. And that would be very unfortunate for us and our client. And it would give Silverlight an advantage. (Assuming that Silverlight supports RTSP, but I would think so, because it uses Windows Media Player)

There seems to be a bug in Flash 9 Player for Macintosh. The fscommand("exec", "myapp.app") is not working. If you save your movie as a Flash 8 movie and publish it as a Flash 8 projector it works again.

You can download a demo here.

Just found out that x*x is about 78% faster than Math.pow(x, 2) in ActionScript (Flash 8, Windows)

In case you want to test it for yourself, here's some sample code:

In december I gave a workshop to students mastering in visual arts at the 'Hogeschool voor Wetenschap en Kunst' in Ghent, Belgium. The goal of the workshop was to create an interactive application / installation based on camera input. Since these students had a basic knowledge of Flash and hardly any programming experience, I tried to make it as simple as possible for them. I created a Flash component that includes many filters, edge detection, motion detection, a particle system, color tracking and a function that would map a property of the camera input (e.g. hue) to any property of a movieClip (e.g. scale). The component hides the user from all of the details and a typical application would requires less than 20 lines of code. So the students could focus on the concept and design and not get lost in technical issues.