Want to learn Red5? Request some tutorials here!

For the longest time I wanted to create video tutorials that would help others create cool stuff; that really would help people get started with something.

I thought about creating bitmapdata tutorials. I thought about covering some of the soundSpectrum stuff. And I even wanted to explain a bit of magic behind advanced runtime effects (done easy). But none of those really made me believe I could help a lot of people out.
But during the past weeks, it came to my attention that a lot of people really want to get started with Red5, but can’t because they can’t find any simple, straight forward tutorials. That’s where I come in.

Starting from september 3rd, I’ll be recording as much video tutorials about Red5 as I can, covering small topics. I’ll keep it short and real simple. It’s about helping you understand the basics and getting you started. I’ll post them as fast as I can upload them. I’ve got some topics in mind, but I’d love to hear from you guys what you really want to know.

A few of the topics I had in mind:

1. Your first Red5 app: Multi-user Hello World (remote shared objects)!
2. How to create the Shared Ball demo app (remote shared objects)?
3. How to create a fridge-magnet app (remote shared objects)?
4. How to tell other users to do something (remote methods)
5. How to build a basic chat app?
6. How to stream video & audio?
7. Building a custom Red5 application in JAVA
8. Executing methods on connected clients, from the server.
9. Sending data to a client (from JAVA to AS3)
10. Recording a complete audio/video stream.
11. Recording a part of a audio/video stream.
12. Room management done right
13. [more to come... Post your ideas in the comments]

Post whatever questions you have in the comments. I’ll try to answer every single one of them in the upcoming video tutorials, using simple demo’s and examples.

Note (again): I’m trying to get you to understand the very basics, and interesting tricks. I’m not going to help you build insane custom apps.

Time-lapse fun

Some time ago I started looking into the wonderful world of ‘Time-lapse‘. I really found it intriguing and I wanted to do something like that myself. So I started experimenting around, and soon people asked me how I actually do this, so here goes…

Let me start with a disclaimer: I’m still experimenting to find the perfect workflow, and figure out a lot of stuff. If you got any suggestions to make: Don’t hold back Read the rest of this entry »

Preloader in Actionscript 3

Gisteren vroeg iemand me hoe preloaders in AS3 werken. Door een ongelukkig toeval heb ik ooit vernomen van iemand dat het ’self-preloaden’ zoals we dat kennen uit Actionscript 2 niet meer zou kunnen met Actionscript 3. Ik heb dan ook nog maar 2 of 3 projecten online gezet in Actionscript 3, waar ik gewoon gebruik maakte van een preload.swf die de applicatie.swf inlaadde.

Dom van me dat ik dat blindelings geloofde, want toen mij die vraag gisteren gesteld werd, wou ik het toch wel zeker weten. Ik opende Flash, knalde een wallpaper van theFWA in frame 2 (zodat ik zeker weet dat er wat is om te preloaden), ging naar frame 1, en drukte op F1.
Na even zoeken werd het duidelijk.

De _root.bytesLoaded en _root.bytesTotal uit Actionscript 2 zijn wel degelijk weg, maar daarvoor niet ‘weggelaten’: Ze zijn verhuisd naar hun nieuwe (en meer logische thuis): this.loaderInfo.bytesTotal en this.loaderInfo.bytesLoaded.

Verder blijft de logica die je hanteert redelijk dezelfde.
Ik heb mijn .fla hier geplaatst voor de mensen die het eens volledig willen bekijken.
Ik vind de Actionscript 3 benadering van preloaden wel veel leuker, en makkelijker.