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Tuesday, 04 September 2007 |
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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) |
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Friday, 18 May 2007 |
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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.
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Wednesday, 07 February 2007 |
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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:
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Tuesday, 26 December 2006 |
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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. |
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Saturday, 07 October 2006 |
So it seemed. The Firefox Flash plug-in isn't really ignoring keypresses, it is the Key.isDown() function that is always returning false. We found out that this is one of the symtoms of the dreaded Firefox wmode bug. We had a hard time finding that out, although many people have written about this bug.
It seems that a lot of bloggers put the solution in their title and not the problem. Googling for "flash firefox wmode key bug" will return lots of relevant articles, queries such as "flash firefox key bug" and alike hardly return anything relevant.
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Thursday, 14 September 2006 |
Over the last 2 weeks my company Atomik Studios created a motion background for the inauguration of the new Alcatel/Lucent headquarters in Antwerp. This was a VIP event featuring our prime minister as one of the speakers. The animation itself was quit simple, just a bunch of arrows moving slowly from the left to the right. Once in a while a photo or a text would fly along. The presentation was processed by a Barco Encore Video controller and projected with a Barco SLM R9+ projector on a 6 x 3 meter (20 x 10 feet) screen, at a resolution of 1400 x 1050.
As you can tell from the hardware and the high resolution, the projection was sharp as a knife. 1 pixel = 4,2 mm = 0.16 inch. We did some tests in Flash and Director but they both suffered from jerky motion and page tearing.
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Sunday, 30 April 2006 |
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Today (sunday) I went to work to get a job done that was running late. I wanted to open a Flash projector on a samba share and my Vexira antivirus software complained that the file was containing a Win32.Tenga.A virus. I was so stupid and arrogant to think that the file couldn't contain a virus, because I had used it before without a problem, because it was on a linux server and that the executable was coincidentally containing the virus's signature and that the guys from Vexira hadn't noticed. So I restored the projector from quarantine, turned off my virus scanner and launched the projector. How stupid can you be. A minute later I had 2062 infected executables on my system, my windows would only start up in safe mode and my network connections are gone. That will set me back another day or two, trying to find out how the virus got on our server, scanning all computers in the office and restoring mine.
So always trust your virus scanner. |
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