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tehxike1
Known Participant
December 2, 2010
Question

FMS Smart Seek "feature" a miserable hack?

  • December 2, 2010
  • 1 reply
  • 1274 views

I continue to run into issues with using this new feature...  The product website tauts "fast motion" and "slow motion" as nice new features, but they're absolutely miserable to make work.  There is no property to set to make NetStream play at 2x, .5x, etc.  Rather, you have to setup a timer that will simply step at the necessary speed to make the video move at the rate you want.  So now instead of just calling play/pause/resume on a stream, you have to implement a separate set of functionality to control alternate speed playback.  Once this is achieved, however, you'll find that a stream is extremely sensitive when all of these calls to step are occurring.

My current issue is that when stepping,  if the user attempts to seek to another location (presumably to continue watching their 2x speed at that location), the stream hangs.  Subsequent calls to step seem to be ignored- the stream remains at the seek time.

Are there any plans to make any of these features more standard in NetStream?  The amount of nasty hacks I have in my player to trick things into working are piling up and making my code absolutely miserable to maintain.

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    1 reply

    Graeme Bull
    Community Expert
    Graeme BullCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    December 8, 2010

    This is really a Flash Player issue more than an FMS issue. Currently I think that they have just improved on the "seek" feature to allow you to seek fast to a spot (instead of the next second it seeks to 2 seconds ahead for 2x kind of thing).

    I doubt it's on Adobe's radar for something soon just yet but I know they think about it because it's a requested feature.

    There shouldn't be a reason why it would hang though, I suspect somewhere in the code a "hack" can be implemented to slow down the seeks so that the Flash Player doesn't get overwhelmed. Maybe trace out the status messages for the netStream and see what they are. Is it failing on the play maybe?

    T
    tehxike1Author
    Known Participant
    December 9, 2010

    Yeah, it may be more of a Flash thing, but I really don't know what other options there are...  NetStream is closed-source, so I'm at the mercy of it and the nearly-worthless events it provides.

    I agree that it shouldn't hang...  The events do nothing to suggest that there's a buffering problem, connection problem, or problem with the seek.  In fact, we're listening to make sure that the seek was successful before continuing the stepping.  It's some awkward raise condition that is very difficult to work around.  I can make the UI wait for 5 seconds before stepping and it will work fine, but honing it down to some amount that's safe for everyone regardless of bandwidth is difficult.

    Ultimately I think NetStream needs to support a playback speed option where it will handle the stepping itself, so a custom player doesn't have to hinge on both regular playback and timer-driven stepping playback.

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