But yeah, I just wanted to point out to people out there that AMP (Adobe Media Player) can play FLVs!!!

I've tried it on only Windows so far, but I'd think it can play FLVs on all three major platforms (win/mac/lnx) since there is an AMP available on each.

1. Install Adobe Media Player from here: http://get.adobe.com/amp/ (click at the bottom of that flash box)

2. On Windows, right-click an FLV file, hover over "Open With.." then select Adobe Media Player.

3. And bada bing, you've got your FLV playing.

I can't remember, but there was a specific reason (having to do with CS4 compatibility or something) that they didn't register .FLV's default player to be AMP, but I'd imagine you can do that manually if you don't want to do the right-click->open with... thing.

Developers: If you don't like the idea that you have to install AMP (which serves many purposes other than just playing FLVs), you can probably make your own lean FLV player using AIR. If you do, it'd be super cool if you open sourced it, and shared bins. Just a thought.

I've been wanting this feature in for the longest time... and now it's in the flash player (currently in beta).

Basically now you can create Flash games that go in full screen mode and be able to use certain keys that are often used by games. We had initially prevented keyboard access altogether for security reasons... like phishing... but i guess you can't really phish too much out of arrow keys, space bar, enter, etc.... but you can make some great games this way.

Hope you guys like this new feature :-)

Interesting list. Ipod imitators, vista, 64-bit PCs, Netscape 6, and DRM are all on there.

I don't agree with all of it though, for example, the concept of a paperless environment. At Adobe (and at old school macromedia for that matter), we REALLY do have a paperless environment. I mean of course we have a standard laser printer / fax machine like any other office environ, but the vast majority of our communication is paperless. We use wikis heavily and (of course) pdfs. In college i remember reading about "The Paper Paradox" which basically said that computers and networking are supposed to reduce paper, but because of the ease of printing, paper consumption has actually increased. To that I say that it takes not just the technology needed to go paperless, but also a generation that grew up paperlessly. If students were to turn in their essays via PDF and/or Word docs, they'll grow up doing the same. And besides, look at what craigslist has done to the newspaper industry. But yeah, it's still debatable.

Also, I use vista at work, and it works fairly well if you disable UAC. My computer is freakin' fast though (at the time of this writing). Vista does make HW installation smoother (even though the article says the opposite), and trouble shooting works pretty well too. I used to use google desktop, now i use vista's native searching, which i like a little better since its native. The task bar is a little less buggy. I don't like the new start menu (even though a good friend of mine worked on the usability research for it)... too much clicking. But yeah, i could have lived with XP. I can't wait until like Ubuntu or some other Linux becomes a lot more user friendly (and Adobe AIR could be the answer to this when we release a Linux version by the way).

Check out the video:

Ever make a really awesome Line Rider track, and wanted to share it with your friend so that they could not only view it, but can also work on it themselves?

well you can, it's really easy, and here's how...

that's some crazy stuff. And we hired one of the researchers, Shai Avidan, to be part of our special research group:

http://news.com.com/8301-13580_3-9768707-39.html

And I guess somebody implemented the algorithm in flash as well:
http://www.quasimondo.com/archives/000651.php

good stuff.

well i did, and it was a real pain to figure this out, but in reality is pretty easy. Here's how (starting from the beginning):

1. you generate a private key, lets call it privkey.pem ... you'll probably do this with OpenSSL like i did

2. from that with OpenSSL you generate a request, CSR or whatever

3. submit that to "the authorities" whoever that may be in your case, if intranet, maybe your "IS" or "IT" dept... if public, then maybe somebody like godaddy.com

4. they give you "the cert"

5. now you're like, "yipeee!!! i got a cert, but what do i do with it? how do i install it?"

6. go here: (your FMS installation directory)\conf\_defaultRoot_\Adaptor.xml

7. Scroll down or Ctrl+F "SSL" and you should see a SSLCertificateFile tag, this is where you specify the full path of the cert file like this:

<SSLCertificateFile>C:\myCerts\theCert.cer</SSLCertificateFile>

8. You also need to point to the .pem file, for that, specify the SSLCertificateKeyFile like this:

<SSLCertificateKeyFile type="PEM">C:\myCerts\privkey.pem</SSLCertificateKeyFile>

Simple as that, now restart FMS and you should be set.

BUT WAIT!! what about the intermediate cert... all you do is open up your .cer file in a text editor, and paste the intermediate cert below the actual cert. If u dont know where to get the intermediate cert, ask the admins that issued you the cert in the first place.

hope that helps.

in the HTML ActiveContent Javascript code add the flashvars parameter:


AC_FL_RunContent(
'codebase', 'http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0',
'width', '490',
'height', '490',
'src', 'ColorGen',
'quality', 'high',
'pluginspage', 'http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer',
'align', 'middle',
'play', 'true',
'loop', 'true',
'scale', 'showall',
'wmode', 'window',
'devicefont', 'false',
'id', 'ColorGen',
'bgcolor', '#ffffff',
'name', 'ColorGen',
'menu', 'true',
'allowFullScreen', 'false',
'allowScriptAccess','sameDomain',
'movie', 'ColorGen',
'salign', '',
'flashvars', 'boxColor=0x0000FF'
); //end AC code

(see the second last line)

And you should throw the same flashvars parameter in the object tag in the noscript for those who have JS disabled like this:

<param name="flashvars" value="boxColor=0x0000FF"/>

... now when you want to access it, instead of doing a _level0.boxColor like in AS2, you simply do a:

loaderInfo.parameters.boxColor


and bada-bing.

And of course you could add more flashvars name-value pairs separated by &'s... kinda like URL parameters

why a whole blog post on this? cuz i didn't see it in AS3 LR on livedocs, and i could imagine wasting a lot of time on this if i didn't work at adobe and didn't have access to our massive testing library.

thought i'd share.

And by the way, here's some more information from livedocs:

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/2/docs/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=LiveDocs_Parts&file=00001005.html#166514

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/2/docs/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=LiveDocs_Parts&file=00001585.html#171273

And here's an URL if you want to use flashvars with Flex:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/2/docs/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=LiveDocs_Parts&file=00001004.html

That's all fine and dandy, but the side effect is that Adobe's reputation of "flash video" suffers -- people start thinking that the video quality of flash is just inherently low, which is wrong.

revver.com doesn't seem to have high quality flash video, but its still much better than youtube. And their integration all around is just better, notice if you are using internet explorer how you didn't have to "click" on the flash video (it's called "Active Content," or "How Microsoft screwed Adobe by giving in to the EOLAS law suite")... well anyway, this lack of a need to click on that horribly annoying transparent box is because they generate a script tag for you (as opposed to the old fashion object tag).

And my favorite feature, they actually use the "full screen" capability -- my God! it's about time people started using it, we threw it in since like 9r28 in around January. All you do in ActionScript is check the version, if its >= 9r28, modify the context menu to have the "Go Fullscreen" option by calling like stage.DisplayState = "fullscreen" or something. You also have to add an "allowFullscreen=true" to your object/script tag in HTML, but adding it in for an older version of flash player shouldn't hurt.

but yeah, good stuff revver.com, keep it up!

CORRECTION:
Youtube does go full screen... they threw it in in May i think. I was looking in the context menu for some reason, but there's this little button they added in the bottom right corner that i guess i never noticed.

I guess its a Youtube program management decision, but IMO it would be a good idea to throw that full screen option in the context menu... the flash player API lets you do that fairly easily.

So, what benefit is it to you? The Flash Player's security model can often be very complicated because of its unique place and function in a user's computing experience. Providing this socket server will serve as a fully functional example of how to interact with the Flash Player's Socket class ( flash.net.Socket ) with respect to using low-level bytes, its security model ( socket policy files, etc ). In fact this is the server side software that the flash player team (my team) uses at Adobe to test the functionality in the first place.

Since we have no reason to crunch any data on the server-side, we simply accept data from the client, and echo it back. In the real world, i could imagine that there would be some server-side crunching going on, so in my code look for where i'm doing the echo'ing (in an "else" clause in the AquaClientThread's run() method) and start from there.

Oh, and also, for the record: This does not count as official Adobe software, its just something i made that we use internally that I thought others can benefit from, don't be surprised if you find significant bugs. Also, for all we know, the Socket security model (or something) could change which would cause this server to break -- so if you use it, be prepared to have to make changes to it if necessary.

I've copy/pasted our internal documentation below: