macromedia flash flashcom: hey there

I am completely new to flashcom server.


I have been talking to the flashcom customer service over the phone, who by
the way were very friendly, but they said they couldn't answer my questions and
forwarded me here.

How does flashcom work?

I have shared hosting. Can I run flashcom?
Is it an install on my local machine? Or on the server?

Do I need a dedicated server? etc. etc. etc.

I have been looking through FAQ's an online tutorials but I cant seem to find
anything.

Would anyone out there be able to help?

Love you all lots.

-Will

Flashcom needs to be installed on the server you are using. I don't know of any
hosting companies offering the service, but if you just want to learn, and
experiment with it, you can install it on your local machine to work with a
server.

I have just installed it on mine, and was dead easy to install. You will need
to install a server first - if you don't want to run a public server, you can
use a local installation.

I am using Apache 1.3.29, available for free from www.apache.org

MJQTREBLE is right,
Here is some more information about flashcom
-You dont need dedicated server for it, it depends what you are using FCS for.
If using for video,audio streaming, prefer to use dedicated server for that.
otherwise you can install along with the Web Server.
-Its always installed on the server, think FCS like a webserver, you are
using to make people connect with each other.
Can you ever install Webserver on your local machine? No, wont be accessible
all the time.
But for testing just like webserver you can install on your local machine.
-Flash Com is like a distributed system. You connect to it and it saves the
state of the application and automatically update to all clients connected to
it.
For example, think you have a five people accessing a media player on a web
page, and you have all controls on it and you need the functionality that if
any of the user accessing the page pauses the player you pause on all people
accessing that page, same with other controls like play, stop. How can you do
that using simple javascript. Probably you will have some kind of timer which
will call server to find out whats the state. So if something doesnt change at
all you are just requesting server for nothing.

Now think in FCS, it has the ability that if you have many people connected to
server, if you just pause the player on one side it will pause the player on
all people accessing that page, programming this is very easy on FCS.

Another application is it keeps track of all client connected to server. Think
you have some web based chat application and you have a logout button. How do
you keep track of user logged in Chat application. If user clicks on logout
button you just think he is gone, but what if he presses close button in a
browser instead. FCS comes into picture here as well, it can keep track of all
this

So it's basically a "two way street" for flash video.

Basically I'm looking for the best way to stream large video from my site.
Is flashcom the answer? Or just simple flash 8 tools?

Maybe I'm looking in entirely the wrong place altogether?

Thanks, by the way.

FCS is mainly used for conferencing, not streaming. What kind of streaming is
that. Is that live streaming or just a normal streaming. If its a normal
streaming then you wont even need FCS for that. You can directly access and
stream file from the server into Flash.

yeah not live video, just recorded.

How does .flv work?

I just created a .flv from a .wmv and it's twice as big (15MB --> 30MB).

It was all uploaded here: www.stfusa.com/misc/tutorial

What's hte best way to steam video?

Thanks.

I think the topic is straying from the OP's question about shared hosting.

The first thing to understand is that FCS is completely separate and
independant from your http hosting account. The .swf, no matter where you serve
it from, can connect to any FCS server, anywhere.

FCs has to be installed outside of the http root directory (which is where
your website is served from), so installing it to a single account on a shared
host's server isn't something that you can do.

Next... we have to understand ports. Http traffic, by default, runs on port
80. Therefore, most http servers are configured to listen to post 80 for
incoming requests. Flashcom, if you want to be able to get past firewalls and
proxies, also needs to be able to listen to port 80 (do a search on "tunneling"
to find out why). Since you can't have two applications listening to the same
port on the same IP, you'll want flashcom to be on a separate IP. You host can
have multiple IP's on a single server, so you'd basically be asking them to set
up an IP for you, install FCS, and bind it to the appropriate ports on the
dedicated IP. Most shared hosts won't do this for you.

This leaves you with a couple of options. You can either run your own FCS
server, or buy shared FCS hosting from an outfit like Influxis or MediaTemple.
The upside to running your own server is that you have access to all of the
configuration files... and once you start developing more complex applications
of when you need to gain additional control of access to various applications
you'll find that to be very helpful.

As for a dedicated server, your traffic volume, criticality of your
applications, and the license you buy will dictate what you need in terms of
hardware and bandwidth. For example, I run FCS with 2 personal licenses. Since
my bandwidth cap is 2mbps, I don't have that many concurrent users, I run FCS
on a desktop computer (WinXP Pro/3.4ghz P4/2g ram) on my network and a 15/2
cable connection. If you'll be serving a lot of people at once, or if you'll be
serving lots of high quality video streams, you'll want to arrange for a real
server in a good datacenter.

The machine the FC server is installed on does not need an http server, unless
you want to serve files over http.

HTH

Originally posted by: lavashark.com
yeah not live video, just recorded.

How does .flv work?

I just created a .flv from a .wmv and it's twice as big (15MB --> 30MB).

It was all uploaded here: www.stfusa.com/misc/tutorial

What's hte best way to steam video?

Thanks.

The old flv codec (sorenson spark) is not as efficient as wm or qt. In
general, the same bitrate of video (encoded from the same source) will make a
larger flv file. The new flv codec (on2 VP6) is much more efficient. The other
side to that is you need Flashplayer 8 to view it.

As to your question about the best way to deliver video via flash, we need to
understand some terminology. You can serve flv video over http, but this is not
streaming (it's progressive downloading). The only way to stream video to
Flashplayer is with FCS.

There are a couple of key differences in the end user experience:

1. With streaming, you can scrub (seek) to any point in the video regardless
of how much of the video is in buffer. With progressive download, you can only
seek as far as the download of the the video has progressed. This is fine for
30 second clips, but if you have an hour long video, you don't want to force
people to watch the whole thing, especially if they are returning visitors who
have already seen half the video and want to skip ahead to where they left off.

2. With streaming video, the video is not stored on the user's HD. As the
video is played, it is discarded. With progressive downloads, the video is
stored inthe user's temporoary internet files. If you want to prevent your .flv
from being redistributed, FCs is the way to go.

3. With progressive download, all you can do in terms of stats is count hits.
You can track play time, idle time, or any other useful data about your
visitor's viewing habits.

HTH

I am new to FCS too, and have shared hosting plan, they do not support FCS. I would like to try doing it on my laptop. Is there a step by step process to doing it?

Thanks

Originally posted by: FCS_HELP
I am new to FCS too, and have shared hosting plan, they do not support FCS. I
would like to try doing it on my laptop. Is there a step by step process to
doing it?

Thanks


Well... you'd have to install FCS on your laptop and allow access to it on
ports 1935 and 80 on your firewall. Then you'd need to know your IP address.
Then all you have to do us use your IP address as the uri in your
netconnection, and you'll be all set.

Thanks a lot Jay Charles.

I have been playing around with FCS and sample applications and now feel
little good about this stuff.

now i see that my FCS server is not getting started for some reason. what
could be the reason? I see that the FlashCommAdmin.exe is running however
FlashComm.exe is not running in the task manager.

Any ideas
Thanks

I'm assuming you're running windows here....

control panel> administrative tools > services

Locate "Flash Communication server" in the list, select it, and click "start
service".

If it's not in your services list, FCS wasn't installed properly.

Also, if you look in the "tools" directory in your FCS installation dir
(typically C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Flash Communication Server MX\), you'll
find a couple of .bat files for starting and stopping the service. If you want
to make life easy, copy these onto your desktop or some other easily accesible
location.

Hi Jay Charles,

I have done everything. The installation seems ok as i have been able to start
the FCS server previously. The Start Server/Stop Server exists in the Start
->My Programs-> MacroMedia->FCS and also i tried starting the server in cmd
window going into the tool directory.

I am getting system error 1067. I think its not able to find some file maybe
some dll. how do i fix this?

Thanks

Hi Jay,

Thanks i got everything working... I tried adding a 2nd adaptor in conf dir
and that messed up server. Thanks for your help

Flash is sooooo much fun i am already enjoying it.

Thanks
FCS_HELP