I have to say, I've been having a lot of fun playing with Air 2. Among the many new features included are the new NativeProcess and the update to NetStream that lets you append bytes to the incoming data stream. As a result I've create an example application that can dynamically transcoding any video FFMPEG can decode and play it in Air.

However this is very CPU intensive since the video has to be transcoded into a flv format. However I'm planning on adding support in the future. So if it detects that the original stream is compatible it'll just send it to Air without any transcoding taking place.

You can download the sample application below or check out the source code. Enjoy!

<Source />
<Windows Installer />
<OSX Installer />

Finally a good demo of Adobe's new HTTP based Dynamic streaming. Can't wait to dissect this one a bit more. Here is more information about the new feature included in Flash Player 10.1.

• HTTP Dynamic Streaming
• FMF File Manifest Spec
• F4F Parser Info

Can't wait to come up with an open source solution to this type of streaming.

The other day I finally broke down and ordered a CrystalHD decoder chip. The CrystalHD is a hardware decoder than can decode h.264/AVC, VC1 and Mpeg2 in hardware. It plugs into a PCI-Express 1x slot. You can install it on an older mac mini or an apple tv. I have to say the results were fantastic. With some higher bitrate shows my mini would skip. But no longer with this magnificent little chip. I would recommend it for anyone who is on older hardware and doesn't want to pay to upgrade their cpu or system in general.

One thing to note is that in order to get it to work with the latest version of osx I had to compile it from source. You can download the source here. If you are installing in osx skip the "install instructions (kext driver)" section and just enter the following into the terminal. this will let the kext load after each reboot.

sudo cp -r BroadcomCrystalHD.kext /System/Library/Extensions/
sudo -S chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions/BroadcomCrystalHD.kext
sudo -S chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/BroadcomCrystalHD.kext

One thing I would like to see if it would ever be possible to use this with FFMPEG. Imagine having the CrystalHD decode the frames and have ffmpeg encode them in another format. This would increase transcoding times significantly since most of the computer resources would be freed. I wonder if any one has tried it out.

Web Sites

1. Learn You Some Erlang
   This is a great resource that keeps getting added to. It's not completed yet but it's free and very helpful if you are interested in learning some of the basics.
2. API / Official Docs
   You'll never get too far without a good reference to available API's and official Documentation. It takes a bit to get used to but there is a ton of information here including best practices.
3. trapexit.org
   This site has a ton of resources and tutorials.
4. Erlang Factory
   If you can make it out to one of these events I'm sure you would learn a lot. I've never been but I've heard it's great. You can find some videos on their site.
5. SpawnLink.com
   Great tutorial series about gen_server.  Start with An Introduction to gen_server: “ErlyBank”

Books

1. ERLANG Programming by Francesco Cesarini and Simon Thompson
   I Reccomend this book for beginners.
2. Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World by Joe Armstrong
   I started reading this book but switched to "ERLANG Programming" Seemed easier to fallow for me and went into more detail that helped benefit me better.

Assuming you have MacPorts installed. Run the following command:
sudo port install erlang

Once that is done you are ready to install Erlyvideo. Go here for up to date install instructions (you will also need git installed).

Finally on to the fun stuff. go to http://localhost:8082/

Assuming everything worked alright you should see the flash content loaded. Go ahead open up terminal and run the following command replacing INPUT_FILE with the file of your choice.

ffmpeg -i INPUT_FILE -re -ac 2 -acodec libfaac -vcodec libx264 -vpre default -s 480x320 -f flv rtmp://localhost:1935/rtmp/test

Now switch back to your browser where you have the erlyvideo page loaded. replace the url at the top of the page with.
rtmp://localhost:1935/rtmp/test

Click on the Connect button.
Then towards the bottom of the page click the Play button.

Congratulations you are now streaming video to erlyvideo!!!

First you will need to download and install Xcode and then MacPorts. Please go here for MacPort download and install instructions.

Once when MacPorts is done being installed you will need to install a few packages. They include yasm, pkgconfig and openssl. So lets begin getting those installed first. Type the following command into terminal and then press enter.
sudo port install yasm pkgconfig openssl

Once when this is complete you will need to download a few extra files. We are going to compile these manually so we make sure we have the latest and greatest.

FAAC v1.28
FAAD2 v2.7
Lame
LIBRTMP
x264 (download the latest build)
FFMPEG 0.6

First you will want to extract each archive. In OSX you can double-click on the archive to extract or else in terminal use the following command.

tar xzf FILE_NAME.tar.gz

Now it's time to compile each library. Don't worry its very easy. For the rest of the steps we will only be working in terminal. So open it up and navigate to where you downloaded your files. Mine are located in my Downloads folder.
cd ~/Downloads

Enter the following commands to navigate to your faac folder, configure, compile and install.

cd faac-1.28/
./configure
make
make install

Now to compile Faad

cd ../faad2-2.7/
./configure
make
make install

Lames turn

cd ../lame-3.98.4/
./configure
make
make install

RTMP is a little different.

cd ../rtmpdump-2.2e/
make SYS=MacOSX
make install

Your path to h264 will most likely be different from mine.

cd ../x264-snapshot-20100629-2245/
./configure
make
make install

Finally FFMPEG 0.6. This also requires a few more steps.
cd ../ffmpeg-0.6/
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
./configure --enable-gpl --enable-nonfree --enable-pthreads --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libx264 --enable-libvpx --enable-librtmp
make
make install

Done! now you are ready to encode your file and send it to an RTMP server. I've been using the following command to test this.
ffmpeg -i INPUT_FILE -re -ac 2 -acodec libfaac -vcodec libx264 -vpre default -s 480x320 -f flv rtmp://localhost:1935/rtmp/test

Just replace INPUTE_FILE with the video you want to transcode and rtmp://localhost:1935/rtmp/test with the RTMP server you want to publish to. This could be a Flash Media Server, Wowza Server, Red5, Erlyvideo or any other server that supports this functionality.

Enjoy!

So I hope over the coming months I'll be able to describe better my experience learning erlang coming from a Flash / Flex / AS3 / JS / HTML / PHP / Python type of background.

First I plan on converting my current wordpress blog over to zotonic and then try to develop a cool video streaming application that will allow you to watch movies from your Plex DB / XBMC DB over the web using erlyvideo.