Open Source Media Framework Blog

Now that you’ve had some time to evaluate the beta version (sprint 9/v0.9), we’d appreciate your participation in a short survey to help us gauge our progress. We take your feedback seriously and use it to help direct decisions around features and process. We want to hear from you!
Beta 1 Survey

Jesse Warden (fabulous Flash and Flex guru) has a great video overview of OSMF, he covers the details of the overall architecture, and why it is helpful for rich media developers.  Check it out at:

Open Source Media Framework – JXLTV Episode #5

One of the questions I get asked all the time goes something like, “There’s so much change in the APIs from month to month.  When will OSMF be stable enough for me to build on?”  Well today is February 15th, we’re about half way through development in
Sprint 10, and the time is ripe for an update on our progress locking
down the APIs.

Starting with the first line of code just about one year ago, we’ve worked carefully to balance an open and transparent development process that generates feedback with the community’s need for stability.  After all, OSMF is useful only insofar as it makes developers’ lives easier! 

Until very recently, we have made substantial changes to the APIs, but we’ve done so in direct response to the community.  Changes have come from use cases surfaced in developer discussion threads in the OSMF forums, they’ve come from bugs and enhancement requests filed in JIRA, and they’ve come from Adobe’s own API review board.  We’ve welcomed this feedback because the result will be a 1.0 release that has been thoroughly vetted, and one that will deservedly come with backwards compatibility going forward.
 
Now for the progress report.  We’re on track to meet the following goals:

Framework: Our target for achieving
100% review and implementation
for all core framework APIs is the end of sprint 10 (late February).

Libraries & Plugins: Our target for achieving 100% review and
implementation for the library and plugin APIs is the end of sprint 11
(late March).

Progress on locking down the APIs in preparation for OSMF 1.0 is tracked
on the developer website, and there you can find a detailed status
report on what changes have been implemented and what changes
remain.  That page serves as a dashboard to provide full transparency on the stability of the APIs, and you should always look there to find the most up-to-date information.  

For those interested in more technical details on where we are as of mid February, there’s also a forum post from the OSMF dev team.

David Hassoun of RealEyes Media has completed a sample player based on OSMF
Sprint 9.  He has posted the code at:  http://code.google.com/p/reops/downloads/list

David has also written a terrific article on how to start working with this sample player code, to download the article, please click on the link below.

Intro_to_RealEyes_OSMF_Sample.pdf

Juan Sanchez of ScaleNine has created a series of three skins for use with this sample player.  He has included both the SWFs and the project files for developers interested in modifying or working from the designs. These skins are available from the Google code page shown above.

Juan’s Blog Entry

Flashstreamworks has a post by Jens Loeffler breaking down the why and the what behind OSMF.  Here’s a taste:

So why do you need a framework?

The
decision depends on your use case. If are building a small website, with
some static videos, the existing components might work well and provide
a great default UI. A different case are more advanced video projects.
The players might simply not fulfill your requirements, therefore you
have to build a wrapper on top of it, or even build your own framework
from ground up – if you ever built your own video framework, you
probably know this can be a pretty intensive task, and certainly
something you don’t to do for each individual video project.

Read more over at Flashstreamworks…

The ZIP file for the latest OSMF release is live!  Here’s a high-level summary of the latest changes:

• OSMF Sample Player with Chrome.  We’ve heard your feedback about the need for a configurable, embeddable sample player.  The new OSMFPlayer supports all OSMF media types, and comes with a nice-looking, dynamic control bar. If you play a progressive video, you’ll have basic playback controls.  If you play a dynamic streaming video, you’ll have an additional set of controls (for monitoring or switching streams).  The sample player uses the new ChromeLibrary, a reference implementation for how to create UI controls with OSMF.  You can see the player in action here.
• SMIL Support.  A new SMIL plugin allows you to create MediaElements out of SMIL documents, and play them back.  Supported SMIL features include dynamic streaming (via the <switch> tag), parallel and sequential media, and the core media types (video, audio, and image).
• HTTP Streaming Support.  We’ve added support for HTTP streaming in the latest OSMF release.  If you’d like to test this new functionality, please sign for our pre-release at: https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=prerelease_interest.  (Note that the prerelease enrollment form at this link won’t be available until approximately 2/12.)
• Enhanced Plugin Support.  We’ve added a new plugin type (CREATE_ON_LOAD) to allow a plugin’s MediaElement to be created as soon as the plugin is loaded.  This is useful for plugins that monitor the status of other media (e.g. for analytics & reporting).
• API Lockdown Progress. We continue to make progress on our lockdown of APIs, and we expect the lockdown to be largely complete in the next release at the end of sprint 10. Details of API changes in sprint 9 are included in the release notes.  We have been aggressively working with an internal review board to review the public APIs, and have made sufficient progress now that we consider the API to be functionally complete.  The review process is likely to go on for at least another month, during which the primary focus will be on ensuring that terminology and conventions are consistent with other Flash Platform APIs. 

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    For information on overall status of the API lockdown effort, please see our API Lockdown Status wiki page.

Please note:  While we understand that using an API that isn’t fully frozen yet carries some risk of additional refactoring work later, we believe that most of that refactoring will amount to renaming of methods/classes/packages rather than fundamental changes to the workflow, and we encourage you to start developing real world applications based on this build. Your feedback in the next month will really help us ensure that we enable your unique use cases before we truly freeze the API for our final release.

And here are the links:

• Source ZIP
• Release Notes
• ASDocs
• SVN: Sprint9-Stable Tag