Open Source Media Framework (Strobe) and Text Layout Framework now Open Source
July 21st, 2009 07:07Good new to start the day with! The Open Source media Framework (formerly codename “Strobe”) has been published on the Adobe Open Source website. OSMF is a modular Actionscript 3 based video player framework. The framework provides modules for CDN integration, syndication, tracking, etc. OSMF is licensed under the MPL 1.1 .
Read more about OSMF on the weblog of Ryan Stewart.
Alongside, the “Text Layout Framework” (TLF) has also been made opensource under MP 1.1. This is the rich text component that was the foundation for the excellent text rendering in the Times Reader 2.0. More demos of the TLF can be found on Adobe Labs.
I think these two components give a lot of power to the developer of interactive experiences; I am especially excited about the OSMF release. I’ve been debugging a (custom build) video player for the past couple of days and probably this construction of the player would have been much easier if it would have been build using OSMF. This is a very promising project!
Tags: flash, osmf, strobe, tlfFlash Media Server (FMS) Large Scale Deployment guide
July 8th, 2009 13:07Yesterday was the day of the Michael Jackson Memorial. This event was broadcasted from Staples center in Los Angeles. Multiple broadcasters aired the memorial on TV and a huge number of outlets (and here) also used streaming to cover the memorial on the web.
ZDNet has an overview of the amount of data transferred and refers to the Akamai statistics page. They also compare the data exchanged during this event to the recent Obama inauguration. …So far, it looks like the Obama stream record is safe….
Kevin Towes, product manager for the Flash Media Server announces the availability of the “Large Scale Deployment Guide”.
Kevin comments on the origin of this guide : This guide assembles the knowledge of our support, escalation, docs, engineers and everyone who has touched CDN deployments. We culminated all the information into a recommendation guide for customers to educate themselves on the decisions and options available to successfully integrate and scale FMS in their network.
Kevin also added a nice goody in his blog entry: Today, We have also released a new free sample application called LiveStreamCast 1.0 – providing you with the foundation to deliver a live streams across a cluster of Flash Media Servers – simulating the technology found in the Edge server configuration.
Tags: Adobe, documentation, flash video, fms, streaming, videoThe “Flashy” future of TV
July 7th, 2009 22:07At CES 2009 Adobe sneaked the Flash Lite for the Digital Home (aka Flash for TV) and it was officially announce at NAB 2009. In this video Robert Scoble gets an overview of this platform from Anup Murarka (director of Technology for Adobe Systems)
Interview with Jordi Romkema on Spongebob for Atmost.TV
July 6th, 2009 20:07After the recent Adobe User Group meeting, I was asked by Atmost.TV to interview Jordi Romkema of MTV Networks. Jordi has been very busy with a project for Spongebob.nl: the Cartoon creator!
Original post on DutchCowboys.
Tags: Adobe, aug, flash, videoFrom feisty to jaunty (Ubuntu upgrade) – Netatalk woes
July 5th, 2009 16:07This weekend I spend some time upgrading my home server from Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) to Jaunty Jackalope. This was not a straightforward upgrade because some of the release between these version are not available on the Debian archive server and has to be pulled from the “old-releases.ubuntu.com”.
I used the documentation for the EOLUpgrade procedure to go from Feisty to Gutsy, to Hardy, to Intrepid and finally to Jaunty Jackalope. I had to manually hack the Upgrade DistUpgradeControler for the “do-release-upgrade” command in Feisty. These commands were based on this forum post.
wget http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/gutsy/main/dist-upgrader-all/current/gutsy.tar.gz
wget http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/gutsy/main/dist-upgrader-all/current/gutsy.tar.gz.gpg
gpg --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --verify gutsy.tar.gz.gpg gutsy.tar.gz
tar xf gutsy.tar.gz
gutsy "./dist-upgrade.py --frontend=DistUpgradeViewGtk"
From their on it went quite smooth and after some reboots and various “do-release-upgrades” Jaunty Jackalope was running on my system.
Some gotchas: Upgrade from 8.04 (LTS) to 8.10 (Intrepid) needs some attention to step away from the LTS version. See this article especially the section with “Edit /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades and set:”
Prompt=normal
Exim4 had some issues because the DEBCONF variables are deprecated and do not work anymore. Read the document available in /usr/share/doc/exim4-config/NEWS.Debian.gz
Netatalk was a different issue. After upgrading, I could not logon from my Macbook Pro to my AFP shares (including the timemachine backup). It seems that this has to do with password encryption not supported in the current build due to some licensing issues.
I followed these instructions to create my own Ubuntu/Debian package for Netatalk. During compilation I ran into the problem that my headers files for the Berkeley DB did not match the library
checking Berkeley DB library version >= 4.1.0... header/library version mismatch (4.7.25/4.4.20), no
This is a strange problem, because both versions were installed. I patched the “configure” file to fix this. Search for the following line in “configure”
{ echo "$as_me:$LINENO: checking for Berkeley DB link (-ldb-4.2)" >&5
Replace all four “-4.2″ instances with “-4.7″ and rerun following command
DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=ssl sudo dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc
Note: If you already had an older version of Netatalk running, it could be that the .AppleDB files in your shares on the server are of an older version; you probably have to trash the .AppleDB files, otherwise you get an error when MacOS X tries to connect to the share.
After these exercises, I have Jaunty Jackalope running on my Sun Ultra 20. This version supports the sensors that are in the system; so with the warm weather, it does not turn on the fans as high as it did before in Feisty (without the sensor support).
Tags: linux, netatalk, ubuntu
