Flash Player Games – Is It All About the Polygons?

Raph Koster sees the Flash Platform as the potential future of gaming:

John Grden and some of the other 3d elites in the Flash world don’t feel Flash 3d is good enough.

Is either party correct? Is the answer, almost? Or, does it lie to some other web rendering engine to wrest yet another Silmaril from the clutches of old media? It’s enough to make me wonder if the Mozilla cats won’t get jealous and make 3d gaming a part of the html 5.1 spec( three cheers for FOSS and yet another browser land grab in the Flash world). ;-)

Open Bug Base (Jira) + Flash Player = Happy Customer

A couple of months ago I ran into a pretty nasty bug with Flash Player 10. Turns out when using everybody’s favorite browser, IE, and playing back an MPEG4-AVC (h.264) file it was extremely easy to crash IE completely when seeking within the first couple of keyframes. I gnashed my teeth, dropped multiple f-bombs and threw 2 birds in the direction of San Francisco. Then, I hopped online, posted a bug report in the open Flash Player bug base and implemented a hack workaround.

Fast forward 2 months, a new version of Flash Player 10 gets pushed and I’m cruising the Flash Player release notes, because, you know, that’s what an ultra cool nerd like me does on a Tuesday night. What do I find? That’s right, Tinic and friends fixed that nasty little bug that had me cursing their mothers and sticking voodoo needles in a Chumby. Great Scott, Batman–this open bugbase stuff actually works. Congrats FP team, if you lived close I’d show you some serious man-love and buy you a midwest beer (you know the 22oz kind).

ThumbGenie 1.1.0 Now Generates Embed Code

I updated ThumbGenie over the weekend to support generation of embed code. Now, every time you create a thumbnail from an MPEG4-AVC file or SWF embed code will be generated. ThumbGenie ships with a default “object / embed” code template, but you can easily modify or replace the template with your own code. (more…)

Convert an ISO 8601 Date String to / from a Native AS3 Date Object

While making some improvements to my ilist metadata (iTunes MPEG4 style metadata) classes I ended up needing to convert an ISO 8601 date and time string to a native AS3 Date object and vice versa.

An ISO 8601 date and time string comes in two flavors, basic and extended. As you can see below, the basic format simply eschews dashes and colons in favor of a more compact syntax.

• Basic – 20090221T090000Z
• Extended – 2009-02-21T09:00:00Z

The standard requires a fixed number of digits to represent a date (8 digits) or a time (6 digits). When fewer digits are needed to represent a date / time the number must be padded with leading zeros. The Z at the end of the string designates the UTC “Zulu” timezone (GMT or so called universal time).

I took a quick buzz around the interwebs, but couldn’t find an AS3 lib that could convert one of these strings into a date object or take a date object and have it generate a correctly formatted string, so, you guessed it–I spent my Sunday evening whipping together a utility class that will do the trick (download the source here).

I’m not claiming compliance with every nook and cranny of the spec, but it covers the fundamentals decently. Hand the util an AS3 Date object and you can generate a date, time or date + time in the basic or extended format. You can also parse a basic / extended date, time or date + time string and have an AS3 Date object returned with the appropriate UTC values set on it.

Here’s what the basic usage would look like for a date + time scenario:

// instantiate a ISO8601Util object
 var util:ISO8601Util = new ISO8601Util();
// parse a date + time string into an AS3 Date  - takes either a basic or 
// extended representation         
var date:Date = util.parseDateTimeString( "2009-02-21T09:07:59Z" );
 
// to turn a date into an ISO 8601 date + time representation grab a date object
var currentdate:Date = new Date();
// create a string with the extended or basic format
var extended:String = util.formatExtendedDateTime( currentdate )
var basic:String = util.formatBasicDateTime( currentdate );

Hopefully, I’m now the only poor bastard who has to do this!

ThumbGenie: An AIR Thumbnail Generator for MPEG4-AVC / SWF Files

One of the not so nice aspects of hosting your own Jing / Jing Pro videos is generating thumbnails that can be used for the “click-to-play” screen that viewers initiate video playback with. My current thumbnail workflow works something like this:

1. Capture video.
2. Save video to local disk (desktop).
3. Open video with QuickTime Pro ($30).
4. Select a video frame and Choose QuickTime’s “Export Movie as Bitmap” option.
5. Open .bmp file generated by QuickTime Pro in Fireworks (beaucoup $$$).
6. Resize image in Fireworks to fit my embed dimensions (embed dimensions are different than video dimensions).
7. Export out JPEG file (.jpg) with some compression applied (trade quality for size).

Jing’s supposed to be all about the easy, but the workflow above is decidedly not. It shouldn’t be that hard to generate thumbnail images from your JIng videos and it shouldn’t be ultra expensive. Enter ThumbGenie, an AIR application, written by moi, that allows you to load MPEG4-AVC or SWF files, select a video frame and generate a thumbnail image as either a JPEG or PNG file. Wait, it gets better. You can apply JPEG compression and scale the exported image down. Best of all its completely free, as in beer. So what are you waiting for, download ThumbGenie and start generating thumbnails pronto!

If you head over to ThumbGenie central you’ll find some helpful “getting started” videos as well as the installer badge.