Learning basics of Flash related to video streaming?

Question

I am currently working on a on-demand video project. There's a lot of aspects to this such as the recording, transcoding, setting up a streaming server etc. The client will be a Flash powered webclient. However there is one problem with that: I don't know any Flash (I'm a C++ developer).

I am willing to spend some days or weeks learning Flash. However, the size of the Flash universe is somewhat overwhelming. I would greatly appreciate it if somebody would summarize which topics I need to learn in order to use Flash for video playback.

The features that should be implemented for the video player are:

• playback of the video
• table of contents that can be clicked to jump to the corresponding video segment

So that's not too much I think.

And one final but very important question: do I need a paid license in order to create Flash applications?

Answer 1

GotoAndLearn is a /great/ resource. Make sure you select to view ActionScript 3 tutorials, rather than ActionScript 2.

Also, take a look at the ActionScript 3 API. There are some examples at the bottom of each page. Classes you want to become familiar with:

• flash.net.NetStream
• flash.net.NetConnection
• flash.media.Video
• flash.media.Sound
• flash.media.SoundChannel
• flash.media.SoundTransform

Answer 2

You do need a paid license, flash is proprietary. You might be able to get away with working in a demo. If you can get the project done in 30 days.

Remember all of your videos need to have a constant bitrate.

you are also going to need to load your table of contents dynamically. For that I suggest json, but you could also use xml.

JSON loading tutorial