OSMF 2.0: New Features

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Video Player

Online video technologies form an essential part of the Web today. New services and platforms are constantly emerging. By developing multimedia Adobe Flash applications based on OSMF, you can focus directly on user experience rather than multimedia content handling algorithms. Recently, Adobe has issued a new version of OSMF 2.0 multimedia framework. This post is focused on the essential innovations of the latest release. Generally speaking, OSMF 2.0 is the foundation of most of modern video players that ensures uniformity of their design.

OSMF 2.0 has fixed many earlier bugs (especially those relating to mobile applications) and introduced a number of small improvements. In addition to this, the following features are worth mentioning:

  • Best-Effort Fetch solves a well-known issue of media server availability: in some cases, the media server may drop out, and a few chunks of video may be missing from the bootstrap. The new feature is designed to combat such an issue. However, it requires FMS 4.5.2 (which is a bit strange, as it has not yet been issued, and a relevant link in documentation is broken)
  • Doneness allows the video player to distinguish content lapsing as the end of the bootstrap file has been reached from lapsing due to a server issue (drop out). For this purpose, a new event has been added: OSMF PlayEvent.LIVE_STALL. This event occurs in case of server issues (similarly, it requires the yet non-existent OSMF 4.5.2)
  • Customizable HDS adaptive bitrate algorithm. In many projects, default bit rate adaptation is not applicable and hence customization is needed. With the new release, you can do the customization as easily as never before.

These features are aimed to improve handling of content delivered via HDS in chunks (which clearly indicates Adobe’s priorities). In addition, Adobe has also recently announced its total support for Flash Media Server 4.5 in Amazon EC2 and Amazon CloudFront. Now you can create multimedia applications without making any investment in your infrastructure. This way you can focus your resources at enabling unique user experience and pay for the Amazon cloud services only. In fairness it should be noted that this has even been possible before, but you would have to individually select a CDN.

The OSMF wiki page is here.

Please find Adobe’s official OSMF 2.0 announcement in Adobe’s blog.

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