Adobe always manages to excite me with the introduction of new features into the Flash Media Interactive Server. I must confess though that none has excited me in recent times as much as the introduction of the peer to peer protocol RTMFP which has now has public viewing in the Adobe Stratus Cloud server. True RTMP has managed to carry us this far but, the inherent problems of a TPD hub server to distribute content was becoming all too obvious to see. In truth the client to server to client model was just no longer efficient enough to cope with the expectation of a user base that now expects all video to be desktop application quality. True a myriad of deployment techniques and the geo-location of server clusters helped to solve this problem somewhat but, at a price too costly for the average user. Problem now solved with the real Time Messaging Flow Protocol, a UDP protocol that allows Flash Player 10 to communicate client to client. Security is maintained by the server which acts a a mediator to authenticate and exchange data keys between consenting users. The result is startling. A video chat application I built with a camera encoded value of 960 x 720 x 10 streamed with virtually no lag in motion or audio. My test partner was my long time friendand tag team partner Prof Bill Sanders and we talked for at least 90 minutes with no change in quality whatsoever. The screen shot above was at full screen.

Development techniques are however not the same as defacto FMIS development as you have access to only the main classes Stream/NetStream, Application and Client (I may have missed some out). Notably you do not have access to Remote Shared Object interaction (for the moment). This makes for some interesting jiggery-pokery to distribute data to multi-users. In this, I have found the Application.broadcastMsg,NetStream.send methods as well as data binding techniques invaluable. Without a shadow of a doubt other creative ways of routing the data will show up as people get more comfortable. In addition you have the same old echo problems so a headset is still absolutely necessary. You also cannot access the raw data of the streams audio and video (for the time being, I hope). Visit http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Stratus for more information. You can procure a Developer key there and start to try out the protocol for yourself

I will put up the code for this video chat application once I've cleaned up the mess I created in developing it as well as a demo application you can try out.