High-Quality Video with Flash Media Encoder and Acrobat Connect Professional
November 13th, 2007
Acrobat Connect Professional, since its days as Macromedia Breeze, has always included video-support. In fact, the application, by default, includes video capabilities in the default web conferencing layout. This video capability provides a rich, engaging meeting environment (often making up for potentially dull slides 
The latest release of Service Pack 3 for Adobe’s Acrobat Connect Professional had a few significant changes, including support for the On2 codec found in Flash Player 8 and 9. This support was extended to the Presenter Add-In, and this opens up the Connect-platform to support a number of video opportunities moving forward. We have been working on a prototype recently that leverages several Adobe technologies, and the results have been exciting.
The Prototype: Real-time streaming of high-quality video through Acrobat Connect Professional
The application was surprisingly simple to put together. We used Adobe Flash to build an application that connects to a Flash Media Server (I happen to have one at my personal hosting site, MediaTemple), although it could just as easily connect to the Flash Video Streaming Service. This Flash application subscribes to a stream on the FMS server, and then broadcasts it out to each participate via the share-pod (where I had uploaded the Flash application). On another computer, I used the Flash Media Encoder 2 application to capture a camera in real-time, and stream it to the FMS server mentioned above. The encoder allows you to use a variety of settings for your video stream, and uses the On2 encoder.
The results were fantastic! There are a tremendous number of use-cases that could be supported with this basic set-up (seminars or events, previously recorded training sessions, etc…), so we’ll continue to experiment here.
Leave a Reply