Archive for the “Flash” Category

The new Second Life Viewer 2 Beta finally allows integrating Flash-based apps onto Second Life prims (SL lingo for 3D primitives, such as cubes, etc) as textures through a feature called Media Sharing (nothing to do with Brightcove Enterprise Edition Media Sharing).

The nice thing about this is that every visitor will be able to stream individual videos, as opposed to the version 1 viewer that could only set a QuickTime Progressive Download url for all residents in a Second Life location.

Here’s a sample prim I’ve made in a sandbox that has been textured with the Sony MyPlay syndicated player and  some navigation prims that would make sense in a 3D environment.

This article describes how you can use SWF files as widgets in BEML that have been protected by utilities that prevent decompilation. Before we start, just a couple of things I’d like to point out:

• This article is NOT a review of the effectiveness of SWF Protection tools, there are plenty of (endless) discussions on that topic on specialized forums.
• This approach is NOT my recommended one for creating User Generated Content upload widgets. I still believe using a secured mid-tier upload server is a better model. Event with a protected SWF, a proxy tool like Charles or WireShark will give a hacker all the information he needs to get your token if you do not protect your sensitive Widget/Server communications.

Why would you do this?

The short answer is that the SWF format is a pseudo-compiled, documented file format. This implies that it is relatively easy to reverse engineer a SWF file. Just Google “swf decompilers” and look at the results. There are literally dozens of tools that allow anyone to retrieve the complete source code of a SWF. Regarding BEML Widgets, this may pose some security threats if for example you want to:

• Create a video upload widget that uploads straight into your Brightcove account. Again, SWF protection by itself is NOT the approach I would recommend, as this requires including/sending a Write Token to use the Media API in your SWF.
• Create a widget that interfaces with your backend and that contains configuration information you want to give some level of protection
• Create a widget that represents a considerable investment or effort, and by consequence you want to protect from being duplicated

to name but a few.

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Had a little fun with this over the weekend. In another life I used my Amiga to superimpose Pong on MTV. Well, no need for that anymore in the 21st Century. This is the way Pong should be played. Gratz to anyone who can beat the computer while the Stakker video is playing!

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This customized player shows what I believe to be the simplest and most effective approach to a basic implementation of subtitling (or captioning) in normal and full screen mode.

Cue point definitions are not required, this example uses the video progression index and standard subtitling text formats. This means it’s really easy to use this with videos for which you have the subtitling text and time indexes available in a standard format like .srt.

The article also shows how to use a free subtitling tool to create subtitle files you can use with this approach.

The subtitling text size will automatically switch when in player or full screen mode.

And here’s how you do it…

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Advanced Flash integration example with a 3D Flash animation surfacing a Brightcove Player and selection menu based on Play List metadata at key points in the time line of the animation.

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Like most Flash developers, I was grinding my teeth when MySpace unilaterally decided to disable getURL() calls from Flash movies on their network. I was -and still am- convinced that the least MySpace could have done was to set up a program for Flash widget designers with good intentions in stead of hurling everyone back to the stone age (read: HTML links).

Today I finished a new artist site for MySpace and I decided to dig a little deeper into the problem. But first, maybe for those not familiar with the origin of the problem, a little overview.

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