Flash Media Server Article

Beginner's guide to installing Flash Media Server 3

For many of us, Adobe Flash Media Server is rather mysterious. We can see its benefits—and there are many—but actually using it and creating Adobe Flash applications that "hook" into it can be baffling. If you are coming to this technology for the first time, you will discover that there is a whole new workflow involved in Flash Media Server 3 compared to previous versions. This workflow is a bit more complicated than simply compiling a SWF and uploading it and a bunch of FLV files to a web server.

This article is the first in a series of beginning-level tutorials. My plan is to walk you through the process of learning how to use Flash Media Server 3—without a lot of "techie talk." Hopefully, once you have absorbed these tutorials, you will be able to read some of the articles in the Adobe Developer Connection by my colleagues and understand what they are talking about.

Here are all the articles in the series:

• Part 1: Installing Flash Media Server 3
• Part 2: Streaming video with Flash Media Server 3
• Part 3: Using ActionScript 3.0 with Flash Media Server 3
• Part 4: Streaming audio through Flash Media Server 3
• Part 5: Security features in Flash Media Server 3
• Part 6: Streaming live video with Flash Media Server 3

This particular tutorial starts at the beginning of the process. You have downloaded Flash Media Server and you are prepared to launch the installer. Before reaching for the mouse, take a look at what you are getting into.

Flash Media Server in a nutshell

As the documentation supplied with the installer clearly explains, Flash Media Server (also referred to colloquially as FMS) is a hub on which media such as video and audio files are physically located. When you need to access them, the video player (SWF file) makes a call to the server using the Real Time Messaging Protocol (called an RTMP address), locates the media file, and loads it into your movie. The really great thing about this is that "play really does mean play." The video or audio files start to play as soon as they arrive in the browser running Adobe Flash Player. There is no waiting for some of the content to load and—best of all—nothing is downloaded o the browser's cache at all, so the file is secure.

RTMP is a proprietary protocol which uses TCP (transmission control protocol) for the transmission of data packets between Flash Player and Flash Media Server. The real advantage of this method to other delivery mechanisms is that the RTMP protocol is designed to deliver video (FLV, MP4, and MOV) and audio (MP3, AAC, and Nellymoser) files to a SWF embedded in a web page, on a cell phone, or even to an Adobe AIR application sitting on the user's desktop.

The thing is, the media being hauled into the SWF file does not sit on your web server. It sits in a folder on the server running Flash Media Server, which could be one that you or your company owns, or one that is managed by an ISP or a Flash Video Streaming Service (FVSS). For the purposes of this article, Flash Media Server is sitting on your own computer.

The development version you are about to install is not much different than the full installation of Flash Media Interactive Server. Although it has all the features of the commercial edition, think of it instead as a testing server. Just as you would test a Flash file locally before uploading it to a web server, you can use the installed version of FMS on your computer to test a movie that will eventually be streamed.

Having gotten these preliminaries out of the way, let's get started with installing the server. You can grab a copy of the installer in the Requirements section below.

Requirements

To follow along with this article, you'll need the following software:

Flash Media Development Server 3

• Download

Prerequisite knowledge

This article assumes you are new to using the Flash Media Server 3 and are interested in how to stream media files from FMS.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

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