Today Adobe announced the next version of Flash Media Server, FMS 3.5. This new versions adds several new features, most of which are video and delivery enhancements. The two most remarkable additions are a feature called Dynamic Streaming and a DVR-like functions that enables users to pause and rewind live streams.

Dynamic Streaming makes it easier to deliver a consistent stream even when bandwidth conditions and general network health changes during playback. While similar techniques were possible before it is now even easier and in particular much more seamless to integrate this functionality.
The DVR feature is great when viewing live streams, either to rewind back to the beginning of the broadcast or simply to re-view a certain part of the stream. I can see this being a great feature for sports broadcasts in particular.

FMS 3.5 now also ships with an in-built web server in the form of Apache. This allows developers to provide a single point of access to their content and they can now deliver SWF, JPEG, CSS, JS and other assets including video over it. It’s notable that both RTMPT and HTTP can co-exist on the same port (80) and IP address.

Kevin Towes has a full length post on his blog outlining all the new features in FMS 3.5.

Kevin Towes, Product Manager for Flash Media Server at Adobe, has just posted the following note on the Flash Media List:

Adobe would like your help to test the next version of our Flash Media Server software, the best way to deliver media to the Adobe Flash platform and to create rich interactive solutions.

Learn about some of the exciting new features we’re adding that will significantly improve the quality of media delivery to Adobe Flash Player 10 and make it much easier to deploy your own Flash Media Server.
Discover how new delivery technology can help improve the video performance and delivery the best experience to your audience. You will also get a sneak peak in some exciting new live streaming technology.

By participating you will have access to discuss Flash Media Server and streaming with the experts at Adobe and within the community to build relationships and get a jump on creating new media experiences for Flash Player.
If you’re interested in testing this next generation Adobe software, please take a moment and fill out our survey. You could be testing as soon as 24 hours from now!

http://www.surveymonkey.com

You can find out more info on Kevin’s blog at: http://blogs.adobe.com/ktowes/

(But remember where you heard it first <

I’ve just managed to iron out a nasty bug in one of my FMS apps and this issue will likely affect other applications.
One of my clients noticed that some users would show up multiple times in a userlist of one of my applications. The userlist was tied to a SharedObject and users were removed from this SharedObject as they logged off. I noticed that the issue only surfaces in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, regardless of the minor Flash Player version used.
Moreover (and this was the hard bit to figure out) the issue seemed to surface only on those pages which used SWFObject 2 or SWFObject 2.1 to embed the SWF. Any pages using a previous version of SWFObject (in particular I was using version 1.5) the problem did not occur.

My conclusion is therefore that the problem somehow lies with SWFObject and how it interacts with Internet Explorer. For some reason the onDisconnect event is not invoked on FMS (I was using FMS 2 in this particular app) when my SWF was embedded with SWFObject 2.0 or above and I have now rolled back to SWFObject 1.5. Hope this helps someone as it may easily have you pulling your hair out.