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A
Anonymous
February 3, 2009
Question

streaming video in a non-transparent proxy environment

  • February 3, 2009
  • 2 replies
  • 1761 views
We're having a devil of a time with viewing streaming Flash videos from inside our network (i.e. our users can't view most streaming video hosted by others). It appears that the Flash player is supposed to have some sort of fallback mechanism whereby it will eventually use the browsers configured proxy if a direct connection fails. I have seen this happen on occasion, but I'm not so certain it isn't because the developers have written their own fallback mechanisms. Below are a couple examples where no proxy connection is attempted, can anyone tell me why no attempt to use the browsers proxy setting is made? Are there some dependencies on the developer coding the connect calls correctly?

http://www.cspan.org/Watch/watch.aspx?MediaId=HP-A-15001

http://216.40.253.202/~usscanf/index.php?option=com_events&task=view_detail&agid=23&year=2009&month=01&day=14&Itemid=44 (click the "Click here the archived Webcast" link).

Flash version: 10,0,12,36
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    2 replies

    A
    Anonymous
    February 4, 2009
    Hi Matt,

    Adobe is watching :-). Pankaj and I both work for Adobe. The best way to give feature requests to the whole team, though, is to use this form:

    http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

    Those e-mails are sent to many people across the team and are taken very seriously-the team really appreciates your feedback.

    Also, if you see unexpected behavior with Flash Player 10, please file a Bug using the same form and, if possible, provide steps to reproduce the bug. Someone will get back to you if they need more information.

    Thanks,
    Jody
    A
    Anonymous
    February 4, 2009
    Thanks Jody! I will make the recommendation to use a CONNECT tunnel. In the meantime, can you tell me why either of the links provided would not utilize the fall back mechanism? For the most part, we tell users it's a "Flash problem" and to find an alternative source for the information. CSPAN is a significant enough size that we're considering making exceptions on the firewall for Flash. We don't like being put in this position and feel that Flash should work with the proxy.

    P.S. I will file a bug as well...just hoping you could take a quick look;-)
    A
    Anonymous
    February 4, 2009
    While Flash player does a fallback to rtmpt (port 80) when rtmp (port 1935) is unreachable. However, it really depends on the configurations of the FMS and server's firewall

    To enable RTMPT; FMS must be configured to listen at port 80 (via en entry in fms.ini
    ADAPTOR.HOSTPORT = :1935,80).
    And port 80 at FMS machine must be reachable from external networks.


    No wonder that (knowingly/unknowingly) a few service providers may not have enabled it.
    A
    Anonymous
    February 4, 2009
    thanks for your response. unfortunately, we see no attempt to use rtmpt in the examples provided (directly or through the proxy). I have tested with 9.x and in most cases it does fallback (after a ridiculous amount of tries/timeout) and attempt to use rtmpt through the proxy. Only once this happens do we need to worry about whether the forwarding proxy will allow the requests and whether the origin server environment is setup correctly. First we have to see Flash using the proxy and version 10 does not appear to do so unless rmtpt is called directly. Looking at the example URL's provided, do you see anything in the way they are coded that would prevent the fallback mechanisms from working?

    FWIW, I have a sugggestion for Adobe..I'm sure they're watching;-) LOL. This is all rather silly business IMHO. Why doesn't flash just use [or fall back to using] CONNECT calls through the proxy, similar to the way an SSL connection through a proxy works? The developer wouldn't need to change a thing in FCS. The player wouldn't have to wrap everything up in HTTP so there would be [conceptually] less of a performance issue. Seems like a no brainer to me. The proxy would need to be configured to allow CONNECT tunnels on port 1935...but that's easy to do.
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