Wolfgang Reutz's Blog

Some notes i made during the presentations at Flash on the Beach 2009 (#fotb):

Bytelevel Workshop

by Lee Brimelow

Links:

getMicrophone()
ByteTrainer
http://www.bytearray.org/

number.toString(2); // displays the number with base 2

Chuck Freedman:

do some research on OSC and flash, email Chuck!

Cybernetic Art Revisited

by Dr. Woohoo

homepage: www.drwoohoo.com

links: OpenFrameworks

Epiphany

by Joel Gethin Lewis

homepage: www.joelgethinlewis.com

links:

OpenCV
OpenFrameworks
Box2D

Quick as a Flash

by Grant Skinner

Slides: http://www.gskinner.com/talks/quick/#1
Homepage: www.gskinner.com

optimizing and benchmarking Flash

things to learn:

• unittesting with flash!
• performance testing

NEVER MIND the Buffer! FMS Made Easy

by Lisa Larson-Kelley

homepage: www.flashconnections.com

steps inside a app:
1) connect to FMS
2) wait for conneciton + monitor
3) setup stream control

only one NC needed!

mpeg 4 video and fms: MP4:name.f4v
MP4: is the important stuff!!!

fms.ini most important parameters of the server (admin pass, license, …)

dynamic streaming using an SMIL file as the input defining different bandwith files with bitrates as parameter

DVR feature:

in Flash Media Live Encoder make sure “DVR Auto Record” is checked

it’s possible to do DVR without FMLE, but it’s hard to do

Live Encoder vs. Camera object in Player: FMLE better quality, because player has no h.264 encoding possibilities!

Pixel Blender

by Paul Burnette

Slides:
Blog: www.mad.com.au

Pixel Blender uses Pixel Blender Kernels and Pixel Blender Graphs

A Pixel Blender kernel gets compiled into a .pbj file, this has to be loaded into flash / embedded into flash.

In Flash the only allowed function is evaluatePixel!

Always use float datatype in PB! Send an 1.0 instead of 1 to PB.
Always send an array from Flash to PB: ["1.0"]

Pixel Blender Toolkit is the tool to use, but it’s hidden inside the Adobe folder in /Applications, so search for it!

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[Embed("filename.pbj", mimeType= "....")]
var simpleFilter:Class;

For Audio processing use shader jobs!

Play with Vectors!

by Koen de Weggheleire

Slides:
Homepage: www.newmovieclip.com

Connecting the Dots

by Mario Klingemann

Homepage: www.quasimondo.com

Union and Megaphone

by Colin Moock

Homepage: www.moock.org/

Links:

www.unionplatform.com/
www.user1.net/

dentsu elevators

Union demos:

Union test platform
Multiuser Tenonion

MegaPhone

Jam Throwdown

Andre Michelle talking and showing audio DSP in Flash 10:

http://blog.andre-michelle.com/
Kling Klang Flash Audio DSP (link???)

Joa Ebert was livcoding a processing app in only 9:40 min!!!! fucking awesome and it worked!

Seeing Sound – Sound Visualization in Nature & Code

by Jared Ficklin

homepage: jaredficklin.com | www.frogdesign.com

links:

dataplot.zip
frogDB.zip

Awesome show, crazy guy

Showed what is possible with sound and Flash 10, i loved the Crowd Star game and the autocrowd feature for playing sounds And it’s awesome what you can do with some propane, flames and sound -> analog sound visualisation rocks!

Space

by Joshua Davis

slides: http://bit.ly/Mm84J

homepage: www.joshuadavis.com

links:

www.flickr.com/photos/joshuadavis
twitter.com/JoshuaDavis
Facebook
hype
hype WIKI

Some pictures from Flash on the Beach, Brighton
Read more…

I really love feeds. I love news feeds, podcasts, photocasts, all that fancy feed stuff, i really do

The only drawback on feeds is, you need to use a feedreader or a modern browser with the ability to display the RSS/Atom feed in a human readable manner. For that i personally use Flock, but Safari is good as well, even Firefox has some basic display of feeds. But what do all the “not-power users” out there with their Windows Internet Explorer 6 or similar “browser” do?

Some weeks ago a really cool project i was involved in with podcasting was stopped in the last minute, because the people in charge were afraid that the users can’t deal with the raw xml output in their browsers – and they were right, people don’t want to see the XML code, the feed has to be readable.

For this problem, we need to use XSLT and CSS to style our feeds, while keeping the code machine readable. A good starting point can be found here:

Beginning to Style Your RSS Feed – Monday By Noon

I will try that out and will post my experience with XSLT later in this article, so stay tuned.

yesterday i stumbled upon a cool extension for Firefox / Flock browsers to display microformats contained inside a page:

• tails firefox extension (Firefox 1.4+, Flock 0.7+)
• flocktails (Flock 0.5.14+, Flock 0.7)

the plugin scans your currently viewed page in your browser and displays a small, green icon () in the bottom right of your browser if it has found any of the supported microformats inside the page. If you then click this icon you get a topbar in Flock or a ovelay in Firefox which lists all of the microformat elements it has found:

to see it in action try this link

XFN is a microformat to describe your relationship on other people. It’s pretty simple, just make a link and add the “rel” attribute:

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<a rel="me" href="http://wolfgang.reutz.at/">Wolfgang Reutz</a>
<a rel="met friend colleague" href="http://www.musigreview.at/">Andreas Feuerstein</a>

oh, cool, but what’s up next? how can i see my actual friends network? Today i found an answer to that: XFN Graph (opensource JAVA application)

Yahoo now has its own python section in its developer center featuring howto’s and links.

you can see it in the Python Developer Center

there’s also a link to a mailinglist dealing with python access to yahoo webservices

Yahoos Seiten für Software-Entwickler sind um eine Rubrik reicher geworden: Das Python Developer Center lockt Anhänger der objektorientierten Skriptsprache vornehmlich mit einer Reihe von Howto-Artikeln. Darüber hinaus finden sich auf der Seite Links auf andere Ressourcen wie Python-Blogs oder -Tutorials sowie eine Einladung zum Abonnieren einer Mailingliste, die sich mit der Programmierschnittstelle zum Zugriff auf die Yahoo-Web-Services beschäftigt.

heise online – Yahoo! lockt Python-Entwickler

This international treaty would allow commercial broadcasters (radio stations, tv stations, ..) which include free podcasts from independent podcasters in their broadcast to gain some kind of license (for 50 years !!) on this content which they didn’t produce by themself, just for sending it over the airwaves This would be a terrible future for podcasting.

The British podcasting association has a online petition to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) – so hit the link and sign the petition!

read the whole story here (german):

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/74519

MySpace is the world’s largest social networking platfrom with over 18 million(!) users. Now it tries to enter Europe. The whole article can be found here (in german):

http://futurezone.orf.at/it/stories/117345/

in the comments a user mentioned an “myspace alternative” from Austria with currently about 1000 users:
http://www.janusweb.info/site/index.php

notable is, that for each new user signing up (for free) janusweb will by 1m≤ of Costa Rican rainforest – good for our environment!

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.

Recently, Yahoo launched a beta version of a service called Media RSS that lets anyone with footage submit videos for distribution. Bradley Horowitz, director of multimedia and desktop search at Yahoo, said the feature is designed to provide an easy way for “mom and pop creators of video” to connect with people who might be interested in viewing their content. The RSS feature follows the December launch of a video search engine.

This year, Yahoo is projecting that the number of videos streamed over the web will grow by nearly 50 percent from last year. Citing forecasts it commissioned from AccuStream iMedia Research, Yahoo said net users are expected to stream more than 21 billion videos in 2005, up from 14.2 billion last year.

Yahoo’s video-related rollouts come as the company’s arch rival, Google, is expanding in the video search arena. Google is currently running a beta version of an upload program that lets anyone submit videos electronically to its Google Video site, so long as they own the rights to the work. The company said the videos will be made available on its video search site, but has not specified a date.

http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,67302,00.html?tw=rss.TOP
nice roundup of what is currently happening on the video distribution market. i think things will slightly change in future and we can expect alternative or amateur video content as a seperate format next to tv and video on demand.