Please Help!!!

APeterson -

Now that I have a working solution, I can provide some more clarity. I don't know for sure, but I think that the AS3 FLVPlayback component assumes it's talking to FMS 3 when you specify a RTMP url in the source property. I believe that FMS3 implements some methods that FMS2 does not to get the length of the video stream and to guess at the bandwidth that the client has. (I am only guessing because I am not familiar with FMS3)

After digging through the FLVPlayback source code, I noticed that it will connect to FMS2 and the client will get the "NetStream.Connect.Success" event. However, the actual code that starts playing the video stream (NCManager.onConnected()) does not get called until the FMS server has had a chance to calculate the connection's bandwidth and then calls ConnectClient.onBWDone().

In order to render the progress bar correctly, the FLVPlayback component also needs the length of the stream, which it obtains by calling getStreamLength on the server with the URL components after the host, app and instance names.

So in order to make the AS3 flvplayback component work with FMS2, we need to write some custom server-side actionscript code to mimic the things that FMS3 does. I don't know whether this is a bug with the FLVPlayback component, but Adobe is sadly lacking documentation on this subtle gotcha. Perhaps I shall also log a bug via their JIRA system.

Since there is no good way to attach code via this forum:

here is a Pastie for the server-side actionscript that I wrote

I've tested it on a local FMS2 installation and it works with the stock FLVPlayback component and an RTMP URL.

And since Pasties are beautiful, but ephemeral, here is the sadly mangled code in the forum post body:

application.onAppStart = function(){
trace("Initialized. Listening on " + application.host + "/" + application.name);
}

application.onConnect = function(clientObj, userObject){
//accept the client for now
application.acceptConnection(clientObj);
calculateBandwidth(clientObj);
}

/**
* Called by the flvplayback client to get the duration of the stream
*/
Client.prototype.getStreamLength = function(streamName) {
return Stream.length(streamName);
}

/**
* Calculate client bandwidth. Gratuitiously ripped off from Adobe sample app
*/
function calculateBandwidth(clientObj) {
clientObj.payload = "";
for (var i=0; i<1024; i++) {
clientObj.payload += "1"; //2K
}

var res = new Object();
res.latency = 0;
res.bwTime = 0;
res.count = 0;
res.sent = 0;
res.client = clientObj;
var stats = clientObj.getStats();
res.beginningValues = {b_down:stats.bytes_out, b_up:stats.bytes_in, time:(new Date()).getTime()};
res.onResult = function(p_val) {
this.count++;
var timePassed = ( (new Date()).getTime() - this.beginningValues.time );

// If we have a hi-speed network with low latency send more to determine
// better bandwidth numbers, send no more than 6 packetss
if (( this.count >= 4 && this.count < 6)&&(timePassed < 2000)) {
this.sent++;
this.client.payload += this.client.payload;
this.client.call("onBWCheck", this, this.client.payload);
}
else if ( this.sent == this.count ) {
delete this.client.payload;
// Got back responses for all the packets compute the bandwidth.
var stats = this.client.getStats();
var deltaDown = (stats.bytes_out - this.beginningValues.b_down)*8/1024;
var deltaTime = ((new Date()).getTime() - this.beginningValues.time)/1000;
var kbitDown = Math.round(deltaDown/deltaTime);
this.client.call("onBWDone", null, kbitDown );
}
}

// First payload is empty to check latency
res.sent++;
clientObj.call("onBWCheck", res, "");
for ( var k = 0; k < 3; k++ ) {
res.sent++;
clientObj.call("onBWCheck", res, clientObj.payload);
clientObj.payload += clientObj.payload;
}
}

p.s. - DamonDamon -- your issue is different - you need to make sure that the object you assign to the NetStream.client property has an onMetaData(infoObject:Object):void method. I'm sure that you can find some good examples via Google of a search of the flash player forums.