This article provides a high-level overview of the new live DVR (digital video recorder) functionality of Adobe Flash Media Server 3.5. It explains the basics and opportunities of live DVR on the web and will inspire you with what is possible by means of a simple example covering the suite of Adobe tools available for streaming and consuming live DVR-enabled content.

DVR functionality was introduced with Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5:

• To publishlive DVR-enabled content, one of the best solutions is Flash Media Live Encoder 3.0, which now has DVR-enabling capabilities. However, in this article, I will focus on developing a publishing solution from scratch using Adobe Flash Player as the video capture solution.
• To consumelive DVR-enabled content, no specific Flash Player or Adobe AIR version is required. Therefore, any Flash Player version 6 or later should work just fine, depending on the video codec being used.

Note: DVR functionality is not available with Flash Media Streaming Server because of the server-side caching/recording requirements.

Live DVR is the process of recording or "caching" a live video stream on the server and then enabling viewer access to the live or recorded stream content as it streams. A unique opportunity for this approach is making the video-on-demand (VOD) content available quickly following the live event without the time-consuming requirement of sending, encoding, and uploading it. The recorded content can simply be made available as VOD content.

After reading Part 1, you should have a solid grasp of how to enable a live DVR stream and how you can begin offering new engaging experiences to your customers. Part 2 shows you how to implement the new DVRCast server-side sample application from Adobe, as well as stream and record content with Flash Media Live Encoder 3 and play back the live DVR content with the FLVPlayback 2.5 component.

Requirements

To make the best use of this article, you'll need the following software and files:

Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5

• Try
• Buy

Flash CS4 Professional

• Try
• Buy

Flash Player (ver. 6 or later)

• Download

Sample files:

• live_dvr_pt1.zip (ZIP, 5 MB)

Prerequisite knowledge

General familiarity with Flash streaming media and programming ActionScript 3.0 in Adobe Flash or Adobe Flex.

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