Comments Stage Video support, newly available with Flash Player 10.2, is now available in the latest OSMF (version 1.6, Sprint 1) library. We’re offering some background on the “what,” “why,” and “how” of Stage Video in OSMF, with the hope of getting valuable feedback on the current implementation from our open source community.
Guiding Principles
Because of the great performance improvements that Stage Video provides, OSMF will now automatically use Stage Video whenever it is available. As a player developer using OSMF, you won’t need to worry about any Stage Video-related workflows – they are handled seamlessly.
If you have a player that uses features which are currently unsupported by Stage Video, you can still use OSMF 1.6 and exercise the (simple) option to disable Stage Video support. Your player can still be upgraded to OSMF 1.6 to take advantage of the latest bug fixes and improvements, while leaving Stage Video support aside.
Also, a website hosting an OSMF player isn’t required to ask its users to upgrade their Flash Player version to 10.2. A site owner might want to ask his users to upgrade, especially if serving HD content, but OSMF doesn’t enforce this in any way.
The Stage Video Workflows
To add Stage Video support to a video player without using OSMF, you would need to handle workflows such as the following:
- Monitoring when Stage Video becomes available or unavailable.
- Making sure that videos are positioned correctly when switching from Video to Stage Video.
- Keeping track of the instances that are currently in use when working with multiple Stage Videos.
You would also need to create a suite of automated unit tests and test these workflows on different operating systems and Flash Player-enabled devices.
By using OSMF, all these aspects are now handled for you. (And, at the same time you become part of a growing open source community that continuously contributes to the quality of this framework.)
One-Line Disabling of Stage Video Support
To turn off Stage Video support in an OSMF player, simply add the following snippet to your video player code before you create any media element:
OSMFSettings.enableStageVideo = false;
Flash Player Versions and OSMF Compilation Targets
Currently, OSMF is available in two variants:
- OSMF for Flash Player 10.0 – This is the variant that provides the core OSMF features and the largest possible installed Flash Player base.
- OSMF for Flash Player 10.1 – This variant contains support for additional 10.1 features such as Multicast, HTTP Streaming, playback of protected content, and Stream Reconnect.
Until Flash Player 10.2, if you didn’t use any of the 10.1 features, you didn’t need to worry about the OSMF 10.1 APIs at all. There are, in fact, many OSMF customers still using the 10.0 variant.
However, with the release of Flash Player 10.2, even developers who aren’t using any 10.1 features probably will want to make use of Stage Video, if possible. Therefore, instead of adding one or more additional OSMF compilation targets at this point, we decided to keep the current two variants and add Stage Video support to them both. Whichever OSMF variant you choose, you get Stage Video support by default.
Feedback Wanted
We’d love to hear about your experience with using the Stage Video support in OSMF.
In particular, we’d like to get feedback on the following:
- Do you need additional access to Stage Video APIs?
- If yes, what use cases would you try to implement, and how would you need to be notified of the Stage Video state changes?
Thanks!
Can you please let me know why the video below plays at about 3% CPU in Firefox on my Win 7 system here when on Chrome and IE 8 its running at 20+%?
All browsers are using FP 10.2 and the example uses Flash Media Playback which I thought was now Stage Video enabled?
http://www.idealhome.tv/pvtsalespack/luscombemaye/video/
Many thanks
Nick
Hi Nick. Flash Media Playback is currently based on the Strobe Media Playback 1.5 code base, which is why you are not able to see Stage Video working. Our recent announcement was to let people know that Stage Video support is available in the latest OSMF sprint drop. However, we wait to update Flash Media Playback with each version release of Strobe Media Playback (i.e. not with each sprint drop). Flash Media Playback with Stage Video support should be available later this summer, hopefully at the end of May.
Thanks!
Cathi (OSMF product manager)
I’ve just tried playing the adobe video at http://www.osmf.org/configurator/fmp/ in win 7, IE8 with FP 10.2 and that runs at over 20% CPU also.
Obviously srtage video isn’t working for me – any idea?
Regards,
Nick
I want to use the latest version of osmf in my Flash Builder project ( a custom video player) but I don’t want OSMF to use stageVideo, how do I disable it? This article mentions ‘OSMFSettings.enableStageVideo = false;’ but I’m not sure where that ‘OSMFSettings’ comes from.
Hi Islam,
I am stuck in this problem.
I want to add control bar to my media player extended from OSMF.
How i would be able to do this.
Please let me know.
Thanks and Regards
Hi, Islam!
OSMFSettings is a new OSMF 1.6 class within osmf.org.utils. It has just been released with OSMF version 1.6 Sprint 1.
OSMF 1.5 and earlier doesn’t include this class.
Please let us know if you need more information — thank you!
Hi,
i imported the Strobe Media Player In my Flash Builder.
But i am getting the following error
“Type was not found or was not a compile-time constant: StageVideoEvent. StrobeMediaPlayback”
i am stuck from last 2 days.
I am beginner so donot know much about it.
please let me know how i would be able to compile strobe media player with stage video feature.
Thanks And Regards.
Thanks for the response. I was using the wrong SWC that was included in the 1.6 zip apparently but now I see that settings class.
Now I’m trying to use stage video only sometimes and I’m using dynamic streaming with FMS Version: 3,5,4,1011 through CloudFront and while it works fine for some test streams from Adobe (ex: mp4:mediapm/ovp/content/demo/video/elephants_dream/elephants_dream_768x428_24.0fps_408kbps.mp4), a problem happens when I test it with our server and content (private and I can’t share the URL). A video’s display (audio plays fine) shows up only after I seek a bunch of times then it displays fine for the whole timeline. I’ve made sure there’re are no other display objects, wmode=direct, and added -swf-version=11 to compiler options.
Any ideas why this would happen? The videos play fine with stage video turned off.
Hi Islam,
What do you mean when you say that you were using the wrong SWC included in the 1.6 zip? I’ve taken a look and confirmed that the swc posted in the zip is the correct one?
I’d like to learn more about what you experienced. Thanks,
GabiD. (OSMF QE)
Sorry, it actually also happens with the Adobe test streams. I’m trying to narrow it down further to see if the problem is related stream switching.
Did you ever pinpoint the underlying cause for the problem you were seing?
GabiD. (OSMF QE)
hi,
how i would be able to add control bar to media-player extended from the OSMF.
I am new to this field and please suggest some good resources , that will be helpful for me gaining good insight of osmf.
I went through one example of controlbarsample but couldn’t got it right .
So please let me know how i will be able to add control bar to media player.
I will be waiting for your favorable response.
Thanks and Regards
I’m trying to put together a dead-simple example of the “built-in” StageVideo support in OSMF. I would like to have an easy way to tell if stage video is working in a specific client (outside of watching CPU usage). It seems from the sample Strobe Media Playback implementation (http://blogs.adobe.com/osmf/2011/02/getting-started-with-stage-video-support-in-osmf-and-strobe-media-playback.html) that this API exists, but I cannot seem to find any reference to StageVideo in the OSMF 1.6 docs. Please advise.
Hello.
“OSMF for Flash Player 10.0 – This is the variant that provides the core OSMF features and the largest possible installed Flash Player base.”
Where I can find this variant or how to compile the sources for FP 10.0. I don’t need advanced features that come with higher versions.