New Year, New Blog entry; HTML 5 & Video ; Additional Blog Sites

Honestly, I think I post more on facebook than I do on my own blog. True to form, I practice more than I preach, so writing on a blogger site is not too frequent for me.

On the immediate front, we've had some internal debate amongst the consultants at New Toronto Group about the merits and challenges of HTML 5 . For me as a developer and instructor showing people how to employ video on the Internet, HTML 5 and video has a number of hurdles to overcome:

The video is still progressively downloaded. This means that the user has to wait for the content to be almost completely be downloaded before the video can be played back. This is not the case when you involve streaming servers like Adobe's Flash Media Server where only the content that needs to be immediately displayed is sent to the user's web browser.

Because of the progressive download limitation, this means that the current implementation of HTML 5 and video also has a restricted seeking capability. For example, you cannot seek to content that has not been downloaded, right? In a true streaming scenario, when you seek to a specific timeframe of video, you would immediately see that point in the video.

As well, if the content needs to be downloaded to the user's cache, this obviously becomes an intellectual copyright issue, as I could then take the content and do what I want with it. All those media people concerned with protecting their assets would be up in arms over that.

So I will wait and see for now. HTML 5 is worth looking into, if you don't have any HTML experience at all...early adoption won't do you any favours in my opinion.

...on another note, it looks like New Toronto Group's blog site is now online. I might post an article or there too... look at this link - http://www.newyyz.com/NtgSite/blog/index.php

A small tribute / mention to Macromedia Homesite. RIP.

boo hoo. Homesite is dead.

http://www.adobe.com/products/homesite/

I chose Homesite over tools like Hot Dog Professional (woo hoo) and Incontext WebSpider (I think) well over a decade and a bit ago. I still have a fully-licensed version of Homesite 4.0 upgraded to 5.5 . With its sister product, ColdFusion Studio, it got me on the path to effective HTML, CSS, JavaScript and ColdFusion development.

[pause]

Ok. back to my current dev tools like Eclipse, Dreamweaver, MS Visual Studio et al.

Microsoft Webinar: Creating 3D in Silverlight

I'll be doing a one hour discussion and demo on implementing 3D in a Microsoft Silverlight application. If you are interested in registering for the live webinar, it takes place this Wednesday, May 11th. More information can be found by clicking here or using the full link - http://tinyurl.com/ntgsilverlight3d .

Interesting article on the "the needs of the haters"

While I work on another blog entry...

John Dowdell works at Adobe and wrote an interesting article "The needs of the haters" discussing how people have dissed Flash without an underlying valid reason - the abuse primarily comes from users who have only seen Flash in the form of banner ads or small animations.

Read more here at http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2009/04/the_needs_of_the_haters.html#comments

Microsoft Webinar Presentation: Intro to Silverlight Workflow

So for many years, I have been into Flash (and more recently, Flex) development, having used the tools since well, 1995 (that's pretty old school). Although I do more instruction now-a-days vs. development, I do investigate as part of my profession other Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies.

Recently I did a live webinar presentation on the workflow for Microsoft Silverlight development using Expression Blend 2.0 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 with the Silverlight 2 Toolkit installed. It was well received, and if you want to watch the recording of the webinar, you can take a look at it by clicking here, or visiting the full link - http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032404580&Culture=en-CA

Where have I been...Adobe RoboHelp Stuff

Its 2009. Again, I am a little slow with my own blog entries, but you'll have to forgive me because 2008 was a watershed year for my personal life. But that's another story for another day :)

Since the last blog entry, I installed Adobe CS4, then uninstalled it (and waiting for a number of improvements to its somewhat bloated interface) and returned to CS3. I have worked with Silverlight 2 stuff, helped work out some exercises for Adobe's Flash Media Server Course, and taught a large number of Flex and Cairngorm classes. Teaching's been keeping me busy.

On the technical side of things, I recently created a course for RoboHelp Server & RoboSource Control, two products that work with Adobe RoboHelp HTML.

RoboHelp Server allows you to manage Help Systems with a centralized searching system and metrics capabilities that allow you to measure statistics concerning published help systems, such as what is the most frequently searched help topic. RoboSource Control is a version-control system, similar to Microsoft SourceSafe. And if you have not heard of RoboHelp, well it creates Help Systems. If you have ever had to look up a help system in any program, chances are it was created with a tool such as RoboHelp. In my world, RoboHelp is just a Dreamweaver editor that is basically geared towards producing help systems that feature functions such as indexes and glossaries.

The challenge was to get RoboHelp Server up and running for a client, as well as getting the RoboSource Server and client components working, and then demonstrate how to finally get them all up and running together with RoboHelp 7 HTML for help authoring. Suffice it to say a large amount of work involved configuring MS SQL Server 2005 to work nicely with both RoboHelp Server and RoboSource Control. After numerous re-installs on other PCs and permission setting changes, I got everything to work quite nicely, and with few changes, it worked well on the client's machines as well.

Alright enough for now. Getting back to work.

Flash CS3 9.0.2 update with FLVPlayback that uses H.264 Video

Released this week, the new Flash CS3 Professional Update (to version 9.0.2) includes updates to the FLVPlayback component to support H.264 video, and provides support for Flash Lite 3 Update inFlash CS3 Professional, and all Debug and Release versions of this new Adobe Flash Player.

So here is my little tutorial on using the new FLVPlayback Component with H.264 video. This assumes that you downloaded the updates mentioned above (available at http://www.adobe.com/support/flash/downloads.html if your Adobe Updater does not notify you automatically)

1. Launch Flash CS3 Professional. Choose New Flash AS3 document from the Start Page.

2. Create two new layers in the Timeline Panel. Call the top layer actions and call the bottom layer flvPlayBack.

3. Open the Components Panel (Window > Components). Drag and drop an instance of the new FLVPlayback Component.

4. Name your FLVPlayback Component in the Properties Panel/Inspector. I called it myFLVPlayback for simplicity. Set the height and width of the component to an appropriate percentage size based on your video. For example, 1080P means (roughly) 1080 wide by 1920 high. I used a percentage value (75) of the original size to fit reasonably on the screen.

5. Grab a sample video that is H.264 encoded. I used a sample from the movie Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest that supports 1080p.

The file was a whopping 126,807 KB (just to say I can do it).

Flash CS3 might pop up an error dialog box indicating that it cannot import the file, but you can ignore it (unless there is an encoding issue with the video, of course).

6. Select Frame 1 of the actions layer, and launch the Actions Panel (Window > Actions).


7. Save your Flash authoring file with a straight-forward filename, like FLVPlayback_H264_test.fla.

8. To test your movie, simply preview it in Flash CS3 (ctrl-enter for windows, cmd-enter for Macs).


9. Voila! Publish Preview your movie (File > Publish Preview > Default (HTML) )


Bonus...Play around with the fullScreenSkin.swf as well to test full screen capability!