Tag: flash

High Definition Broadcasting Experiments

As you may know I have been flirting with live broadcasting on Ustream for a while now. While it is a great free service I was not particularly happy about the default webcam stream, which appears to be very low resolution, not much higher than 320×240. Ustream offers high quality streaming using their browser plugin and even high definition-like using the Flash Media Live Encoder from Adobe. Unfortunately, neither of these is available for anything else than Windows.

I wanted to try so much that I even tried the Flash Media Live Encoder under Vista. Well, it was a total fail… My computer froze after broadcasting a few seconds even at VGA-like resolutions. I think I spent a whole Sunday trying various configurations and setting but no luck. Slow computer? Buggy software? Probably both.

Few days ago I learned that Adobe is now in the process of making a Mac version of Flash Media Live Encoder. Hurray! In fact, it is already available for selected beta testers but no timeline for public release. Fortunately, I was able to find a kind soul who has shared the beta package for Mac with the rest of the world (thanks Google search for finding me this) and so I got the opportunity to become an unofficial beta tester.

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Adobe Flashplayer for Galeon on 64 bit Ubuntu 9.04

I was excited about the new Ubuntu 9.04 released just a few days ago. In fact, so excited that I installed the release candidate instead of waiting for the final release, knowing that it will be impossible to download during the first few days. Anyway, it’s cool, it’s slick and it boots in less than 15 seconds! Of course, one problem that you run into on 64 bit is the lack of Adobe Flash player – at least if you want to avoid installing 32 bit compatibility libraries. Here is how the problem is solved.

First, you need to download the Adobe Flashplayer 10 browser plugin from Adobe. You can get it here. It’s a .tar.gz file containing a single shared object (so file). Since my primary browser is firefox, I installed it into /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/

That makes flash work all right in firefox, but it still didn’t work in Galeon – another lightweight web browser that I like to use a lot. As it turns out, Galeon looks for plugins in the /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins directory, so the problem was solved by simply creating a symbolic link to the libflashplayer.so I just installed in /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/ – that’s it!