Installing Flash Media Server 3 is simple. But actually using it afterwards can be a bit tricky. In this video tutorial I’ll walk through the installation process and then creating a video player - using videoMaru - to stream movies from FMS. There is also a videoRecorder included in the samples download so that you can see how to use your webCam to record videos to your hard drive.

The tutorial also covers how to set your router up so that you can stream videos from your PC to anyone on the Internet. Which can be very handy for application development.

Download Flash Media Server 3

Download Sample Applications

Here’s the WebCamRecorder built in Flex. PLEASE NOTE: if you hit the Start Recording button it will record video to MY hard drive. Maybe I’ll make a webcam viewer page for those of you who record themselves. You’ve been warned. :-)

NOTE: FlexBuilder now displays the live feed from your webcam when you switch to Design view. Which is sort of cool and all but when you switch back to Source view it doesn’t let go of the camera. So when you publish/test the application you won’t be able to see anything - or record - because FlexBuilder already has the stream and there can be only one. You’ll have to restart FlexBuilder to get it to give up the connection to your webcam.

A few more resources

If you’d like to apply smoothing to your VideoDisplay then try this.

Hopefully this will get you up and running with FMS3 pretty well. Please comment if you notice that I’ve missed anything.

Who’s going to 360Flex in San Jose this August? I know I am. Tom and John opened up registration and I jumped. Last time around in San Jose was great. I went to the next 360Flex in, my then hometown, Seattle and it was even better. From the feedback I’ve gotten each 360Flex is better than the last

Here’s what I love about the 360Flex conferences: even if you didn’t attend a single session it’s worth the time and money to attend. The conversations with other developers in the hallways, at lunch/dinner, at the bars in the evenings is just as educational and of course more fun. With the exception of Jessy Warden’s session which is more fun than going to a bar.

So run, don’t walk, over to 360conferences.com and sign up. I look forward to seeing you there!

Things to look forward to at the conference:

• Adobe will announce a public beta of Thermo
• Doug and Deepa will have copies of their book to sign
• The ultra secret site RunPee.com will announce that it’s open to private betas
• We’ll get a hands on with Flash 10 IDE
• Adobe Cocomo will announce it’s open to private beta
• John and Tom will announce that the next 360Flex conference is going to be held on a cruise ship
• FlexBuilder for Linux will be released
• AIR 1.5 with support for Linux will be released
• We’ll get hints of the soon to come Adobe online application suite but it won’t be officially announced until MAX
• and many of the developers of that cool Database app built with Flex will be there. sort of like the guys from VirtualUbiquity were there last year. But we’ll have to wait for MAX for the announcement that they’ve been bought.
• …did I miss anything?

I love prognosticating. :-)

Using tweens to change the behavior of how Flex components transition is very simple. But there are lots of possibilities. So I built this Tween Flex-plorer so that I could see what the different tweens would look like. And of course I always share. :-)

While writing the code for the previous post I ran into a problem: my browser kept crashing when I’d publish my Flex project. All that was happening was that a <mx:Button> and <mx:TextArea> were fading in-and-out using <mx:Fade>.

Sure enough, it would cycle through about 4 times and start getting all jittery and then kaboom! Down goes the browser.

All that’s happening, in this example, is that when you click the top button it starts the other two buttons sliding back and forth. When one <mx:Move> is complete it calls an onTweenLeftEnd which starts the tween to the right. Back and forth we go.

If instead you use <mx:Fade> to fade the buttons in-and-out you get the same result. This doesn’t happen if you move or fade just one <mx:Button>. And it seems to happen with any two UIComponents.

Sometimes I feel that I suffer so that the rest of you don’t have to. When I run across one of those maddening, “but this should work” issues I always try to blog about it so that you - the reader - won’t have to suffer as I have. And I have, suffered greatly today. :-)

Here to the right we have two nearly identical Flex projects. The only difference is that the one on bottom has one line commented out of the CSS: fontWeight: normal;

It turns out that if you want to embed the font for a <mx:Button> you need to set the fontWeight. Yeah, it took me about 2 hours of trial and error to fix it. What really got me was that the embedding worked fine for the <mx:TextArea> all along. Go figure.

That’s it. So why does the fontWeight have to be “normal” in order for the <mx:Button> to get it’s embeded font? In the immortal words of Kyle Reese, “I don’t know. I didn’t build the fucking thing!”

Seriously, why does there have to be a declaration that the fontWeight has to be normal? Isn’t that the default? And yes, changing it to bold breaks it.

Perhaps I’m missing something. Perhaps the Flex team isn’t out to confuse and confound me on a daily basis. If so please enlighten me in the comments. Until then I’m just going to assume that Deepa did this just to drive me mad. Mad I say. Mad, mad, MAD! :-)