F-ab 2.5.0 with embedded Red5 Server for FLVPhone Released

F-ab has released F-ab 2.5.0. F-ab is a browser for flash movies. F-ab has embedded Red5 server to use for an integrated application called FLVPhone in it. FLVPhone is a video conference telephone application in which an email address is required to specify a person to be called in conference.


Red5 0.6.3 is embeded within F-ab application to communicate with remote FLVPhones. Below are the minimum requirements to run F-ab application-

• Internet Connection (Cable or DSL)


• Windows XP or Vista, Mac OS 10.4 or 10.5


• minimum 512 MB of RAM


• Screen Resolution of 1024 x 768 or higher


• Java Runtime Environment 5 or 6

To read more about F-ab, visit their website.

IP Camera Streaming and Red5 Flash Server

Very recently, we received a requirement in which we have to forward the IP Camera stream to a client. It's basically a monitoring application. Let say we have 5 IP camera's and a centralized client machine where we have to throw the streams from all 5 IP cameras. I was wondering how we can use Red5 flash server in this scenario.



I have really no idea of IP Camera. I went through Wikipedia to read more about IP Camera.

I also checked the Red5 mailing list and found that something similar to this has already been discussed but nothing is implemented yet. IP Camera produces JPEG's. I am not sure that re-encoding it to flash video will make sense. ffmpeg and other options are there as per discussion. Guys need your suggestion on this implementation. Meanwhile I will explore the possibilities of achieving this solution and will update you.

Red5 Flash Media Server vs. Adobe Flash Media Server

From many days, i was tracking the search queries which lead people to this blog and I found that many people are looking for the answer of "whether to choose Red5 or FMS". Few queries I tracked were-

• red5 vs. FMS


• flash Media server Red5 compare


• red5 better than Flash Media Server


• features comparison of flash media server and red5


• compare red5 and fms


• red5 streaming vs fms


• red5 vs flash media server


• comparision of red5 and fms


• choose between Red5 and Flash Media Server


• compare flash media servers red5


• open Source FMS


• fms vs red5


• red5 vs adobe


• red5 vs adobe flash server


• red5 versus flash media server

I have written couple of posts on this topic and I will provide the links to those posts here, so that if someone falls to this page can have access to all those posts.

Red5 + RTMPS - Who Need FMS?
10 Quick Reasons Of Why To Choose Red5 Media Server Over Flash Media Server
Red5 and Server-Side ActionScript - A Gift to Flash Developers

As Red5 server is moving towards version 1.0, the curiosity among current FMS developers is increasing towards Red5, because it's a free and open source solution.

Red5 0.7.1 - What will be there for us?

Red5 flash media server is in version 0.7 and the next release is v0.7.1. Below is a look of new Red5 features, known bugs and enhancements, we may see in the next release.

New Features:-

W3C Logging Format

Unlike FMS, Red5 server was not able to logging in an easily parsable W3C format in previous versions. In this new version, Red5 will support W3C logging format.

Detailed Information (Stats API)

FMS provides the detailed information about the stream such as bytes sent, client ip etc. and also provides splitting of logging file depending on it's an event or access log. It seperate outs the debugging and errors of application from Access log. Red5 will now also provide the detailed information as mentioned above in the next version.

Run all protocols on all ports

FMS provides support for running protocols on different ports. According to Adobe -

"Flash Player communicates with the Flash Communication Server using RTMP protocol over port 1935. If that fails, it will try again over ports 443 and 80 in an attempt to workaround firewall settings within a company, which prevents TCP/IP connections over non-standard ports. The above approach allows approximately 96% of all users to access publicly accessible Flash Communication servers"

Read in detail from HTTP Tunneling protocols

In the current version of Red5, this thing does not happen. Red5 only listen to a port configured in red5.properties file. There was no way to listen on multiple ports for all protocols like FMS, but in the next release 0.7.1, Red5 will support this feature.

Enhancements:-

Extend Scope Easily

Previously stats counters in scope were private, so they were not available when you extend the scope. Now all the current stats counters have been made protected to let them easily accessible by subclasses.

Bug Fixes:-

RemoteObject now works with Flex3 beta 3. More details are here.
Marshalling errror when pass Int from Flash Client to Red5 fixed. More details are here.

This was just a quick look of Red5 v0.7.1 future release. More detail information over new features, enhancements and bug fixes will be available in the release notes when 0.7.1 will be released.

Red5 Plugin Beta 1 Available To Red5 Community

infrared5 today released the "Red5 Plugin" Beta 1. Red5Plugin will be great for those, want to build and deploy Red5 applications more rapidly.

Red5 Plugin offers following features-

1: Generate Client/Server applications

2: Test and Debug Red5 Applications

3: Generate framework code

4: Add Flex Unit Support

5: Add support for popular open source libraries

6: Generate example code (not in beta 1)

7: Generate ASDocs (not in beta 1)

With the help of new features such as server configurations, Code generation and the important one debugging support, the development of the Red5 applications will be very fast.

Red5 Plugin is still in beta, so some of the features listed here may not be work as expected, but Red5 Application generation and running and debugging on Red5 is working perfectly.

About Red5 Plugin:

Red5 Plugin is a powerful Eclipse based plugin which includes Red5 project code generation wizard with added support for specific third party frameworks, interactive step-through debugging and more features.

More information about Red5 Plugin is available here and more detailed information of Red5 Plugin beta release is available here.