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ryan_etn
Known Participant
May 15, 2009
Question

Use FMS & Actionscript to Stream Audio/Video and control (powerpoint) slides

  • May 15, 2009
  • 1 reply
  • 957 views

Hi there,

My compnay provides webcasting services to numerous clients, and we currently use Windows Media Encoder as our base software for these projects.

However, I'm interested in switching to Flash Media Server, but need to figure out one issue and how to implement it in such a way like how we are currently using Windows Media Encoder.

We need a way to stream out a live audio/video feed AND have a way to control a presenter's POWERPOINT slides and have them advance by our command when streaming live.

Basically, the way we do it is we will stream out audio/video from WME and also use the encoder's SCRIPTING functions to send out a "url"  from the encoder to the actual page in which the viewer is watching the live embedded stream.  On that page is an embeded/internal frame which we can specify (using the id/name) that the url gets loaded, and this actually advances the slides (or more so pulls up a pre-created html page of the next slide in the person's powerpoint, which is actually a screenshot or exported image of that slide and embedded within a specific HTML file and hosted on the same server as the embedded player/html file)

Would there be a way to send out this same type of script using FMS?   I've been playing around with it and notice the interface itself does not have a built in scripting function like Windows Media Encoder does. However, I did read somewhere that it supports ActionScript... but I have no clue how to implement this feature.

I am just curious how it might be able to go about doing this?  Is there a way to use an [action]script with FMS and have it send out a URL to a specific frameset embedded on the same page as the Flash Media Encoder Playback?

Hopefully this make sense and that someone can point me in the right direction.  Switching to FMS over Windows Media Encoder is the way I would love to go, just need to figure out how this could be done.

Would a better method be converting the powerpoint slides to a swf or flv file, embedding that file within the same page as the FMS playback, and somehow using a script to "advance" the frames/slides/scenes within that file?

I also heard something about Flash "Shared Objects" and how this could be a way of controlling a swf file remotely.....

Could anyone give me some advice and know a method that I could use to achieve this type of implementation?

Any help is GREATLY appreciated!   Thanks!

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    1 reply

    A
    Anonymous
    May 16, 2009

    FMS (the interactive version, FMIS) has complete scripting support.

    What you want to do can be done with FMS, and there are a lot of ways you can approach it. Converting to .swf can be helpful, as it means you have a single resource to load rather than a bunch of individual slide images (the flashplayer can load .swf, jpg, gif, png). Rather than embedding, I'd opt to make it an external resource and load it at runtime... that would keep the player application reusable.

    To get an idea of how to use server side actionscript, see the getting started portion of the FMS 3.5 dev docs

    http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashMediaServer/3.5_Deving/

    Then, see the SSAS docs for the following classes in particular:

    The Client class for Client.call()

    The Stream class for Stream.send()

    The Shared object class

    The Application class for BroadcastMsg()

    The docs give some general overview for the usage of each. The best choice really depends on your deployment architecture and scalability requirements.

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