Can I create/modify flash video stream before streaming via RTMP?

Question

Usually, flash streaming is done by capturing webcam video/audio and streaming using NetConnection and other objects to servers like FMS,Red5,Wowza etc.

I haven't found any example on how to create your own stream of images and stream as a video to the server.

I know it would be possible to convert the image to bytes and send via SharedObjects. Then decode on server and create a video file on the server (e.g. using ffmpeg), but I would rather do it in realtime on the client side if possible.

Is it possible to do it in pure Flash/Actionscript?

Thank you :)

Answer 1

From a technical standpoint, I would have to say no. What you're suggesting seems to be real time encoding of a set of images and then sending them to a server.

Video encoding/decoding is very asymmetric. It is much faster to decode than it is to encode, and Flash/AS certainly does not have to ability to do it very quickly. Maybe you create a custom webcam driver that takes a stream of images, but that would require installation on the part of the user.

What kind of images are you trying to acquire and send? Perhaps there is another solution?

Answer 2

I don't believe any libraries exist for streaming video from AS3. It's very processor-intensive, and probably couldn't be real-time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Video

You can save a .flv containing uncompressed bitmap data with this lib, but that's not going to get you what you want.. http://www.zeropointnine.com/blog/simpleflvwriteras-as3-class-to-create-flvs/

You're probably going to need some server-side code to get this goal accomplished - you'll get much better performance also if your flash app just sends the component photos across the wire (assuming this is some kind of slideshow)...

Is realtime a requirement?

Answer 3

check out Jetstream from impossible software. They do something like this and also have an sdk. Cheers