Streaming Learning Center

Adobe Flash Catalyst is my "go-to" tool for creating and uploading simple Flash Players to the web, and if you own Adobe CS5, you already have the tool. Click over to the article to view a short tutorial on how simple it is to create Flash Players with Adobe Flash Catalyst.

Adaptive streaming is a hot topic for most streaming producers. If you produce your files with Adobe Media Encoder, you should know that Adobe has provided some downloadable presets that you can use as a starting point. Click here to go to the download page.  

Even if you're not using AME, it's useful to check the configurations that they recommend. Read on to see a summary of those settings.

I didn't vote for George Bush in his second term; truth be told, I wasn't that keen on him his first term, but found him better than the alternative. But despite this opinion, I never felt it fair to blame him for all the awful events that happened on his watch. The Crash of 2000, Katrina, Enron, MCI, the sub-prime mess, 9/11, I'm sure I'm missing a few. Sure, they happened while he was president, but the seeds for all these events were planted long before he got to the White House. He just turned out to be the unluckiest president ever.

Now, I'm starting to get the same feeling about how some very vocal computer users are starting to criticize Flash. Slow performance? Must be Flash. Instability? Flash. Slow to load a web page? Gotta be Flash. Fan whirring? Flash.

For more, click to the main article.

Though overshadowed by H.264 in the news, On2’s VP6 is still the most widely used streaming codec in the world today. In this short article, you’ll learn what you need to know to produce video using the On2 VP6 codec, including the relevant configuration options and the cost of producing VP6 video.

All’s been quiet on the Streaming Learning Center front as I spent the last week teaching several courses on streaming media production and encoding at the lovely Stanford Campus at Palo Alto. Other than a quick sneak peak at the new Final Cut Studio, which you can read about here, it was pretty much full immersion into the streaming world from a user’s perspective. This led to several conclusions about the future of streaming video and Microsoft Silverlight that I thought I would share.

As a producer of video on the web, you know that you're judged by the quality of your video. In this regard, many producers are considering converting from the venerable On2 VP6 codec to H.264. H.264 offers better visual quality than VP6, and the AAC audio codec offers much better quality than the MP3 codec paired with VP6. Starting with Adobe Flash Player 9 Update 3, you could play back files encoded in H.264/AAC formats. As of September 2008, the penetration of H.264/AAC-compatible players exceeded 89% in all Internet-connected PCs. No wonder they're switching over.

This article first discusses the issues involved in such a changeover, including the potential requirement for royalties. I then describe the H.264-specific encoding parameters offered by most encoding programs. Finally, I cover how you can produce H.264 video with Adobe Media Encoder CS4 and Adobe Flash Media Encoding Server 3.5.