The University of Denver held a TEDx event today. We fed an RTMP signal through a VBrick unit to an internal Flash Media Server for authentication to be distributed over CDN and exposed to viewers through the Open Source Media Framework Strobe Media Playback.
I was curious how the feed would look over a variety of devices. Here are the results 
Microsoft Windows 7
BlackBerry Tablet OS
Google Android
Excellent!
Linda Dickeson, Adobe Education Leader and Distance Learning Coordinator, Lincoln Public Schools, Lincoln, NE
From an educator’s perspective, I have been anticipating the release of the new version 9 of Premiere Elements. For several years, Premiere Elements has been a popular movie making solution for education. It’s an intuitive video project environment for students from upper elementary school age through high school (and beyond).
At younger ages, students arrange media clips on a Sceneline, similar to creating a storyboard or slideshow. Older students move into using a Timeline with multiple video and audio tracks; keyframes for animation; and professional quality effects, filters and transitions. These experiences position students well to move into using Premiere Pro, Adobe’s professional video editing solution.
So why should educators be excited about Premiere Elements version 9 release? Among all of the various new features, here are a few of my favorite:
There are great resources at Adobe’s new Education Exchange—successful lesson plans, activities and tutorials for multiple curricular areas shared by educators (sign up for your free account). Adobe TV has free video tutorials on every product.
If you don’t have Premiere Elements 9 yet and want to take it for a spin, download the trial and get started! Premiere Elements can be purchased individually or bundled with the new Photoshop Elements 9. It also is a part of the Adobe Digital School Collection.
For the past two years, Serge Jespers (@sjespers) has developed a widget to draw attention to the upcoming Adobe MAX conference that involves both video and community collaboration. Last year’s widget allowed users to post a short message on why one would want to attend MAX. This year’s widget allows users to record acceptance speeches for MAX Unawards and the whole process behind it is a great read!
So… we have a few Adobe Education Leaders who have received MAX Unawards! These are listed below and I encourage other AELs to submit and be added here…
Tom Green (@TomGreen) won the award for ‘Crustiest Tutorialist Of The Year‘
Joseph Labrecque (@JosephLabrecque) won the award for ‘Most Frustrated AIR Developer‘
David Egbert (@DaveEgbert) won the award for ‘Best Un Acceptance Speech‘
Think you deserve an Adobe MAX Unaward? You probably do – give it a shot!
Something we’ve struggled with for some time at the University of Denver Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) is the full integration of YouTube videos within our rich media tools such as those found within the CourseMedia™ ecosystem. Traditionally, this has been not altogether possible as previous versions of the YouTube Chromeless Player were ActionScript 2 based and so were isolated in a separate Flash Player virtual machine (VM) in any of our ActionScript 3 based tools. There are ways of setting up a proxy and transferring messages between the two VMs through that proxy- but it is messy, includes too much overhead, and is nowhere near ideal. We ended up just opening YouTube content within a browser window- not at all integrated into our systems.
A few days ago, however, Google released an AS3 based Chromeless Player. Using the new player API, we were able to not only effectively integrate seamless YouTube videos within our normal display mechanisms, but were provided the flexibility of hooking full YouTube control functionality into our existing controls for native system content. The result being that the user experiences a YouTube video in the exact same way that they would expect to experience a native system video. This greatly improves the user experience and effectively adds the entire public YouTube video library as potential course material.
A quick overview video of how we’ve used this to enhance a few CourseMedia™ tools is presented below:
References:
The ActionScript 3 YouTube Chromeless Player is Now Live
YouTube ActionScript 3.0 Player API Reference
Google FINALLY Releases AS3 Player for YouTube
MediaViewer 1.2.6 / VPS Projection System 1.3.2
Dr. Devin K. Joshi is an Assistant Professor in the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. This interview was conducted by Alex Karklins of the DU Center for Teaching and Learning regarding his use of CourseMedia™ as a faculty member.
DU CourseMedia™ is a course media management system that helps instructors organize and present media materials (images, video and audio). Instructors have access to large collection of art and world history images, library reserve videos and audio works.
I wrote a new AIR app called LiveStreamer available now via the Adobe AIR Marketplace.
This started as a simple mechanism to display a live RTMP stream from Flash Media Server to a client machine and related projection system. So… not for broadcast over the web- just sending a live stream from one physical location to another.
While developing the application, I came across the need to test an RTMP stream and it was so simple using this app that I decided to expand it. In the current version (0.9.0), it will accept RTMP and HTTP streams- just type in the URL and you can easily test it in order to verify that it is correct before trying to publish anything on a website or whatnot. You can also use it as a fullscreen projection or display mechanism as was originally intended.
If you have some FLVs or MP4s or whatnot on your local machine- you can just drag those into the app to watch them. I’m thinking about adding some playback controls and other options a bit later.
Application for display of video streams via RTMP, HTTP, or local filesystem. Just drag in a file or enter a stream address and away we go!
At the University of Denver, we have built a good number of AIR applications at this point. Some are internal data management tools, others are full, complex, private applications such as the VPS Projection system, and then we have small utility apps like this which others may also find some use for. These we make available to others free of charge as part of our community outreach.
