Support: RTMP streams in Autoview

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RTMP streams in Autoview

I would like to use my flash media server to stream video content over rtmp streams in autoview. I have researched some information and have found out that the FlowPlayer which is used by autoview for the flash playback is able to do this.

This is the configuration I am using at the moment, from the Add Video Source option, within the Autoview Moodle Module

Language: English
Video Type: Flash Video
VideoURL: rtmp://myserver.net/application&id=myid
Bandwidth: Streaming

Does anyone know a workaround for this problem?

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This should just work, i'm already using the Red5 flash server with AutoView successfully. What is the error that your getting ?

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Hi Tim,

Thanks for the response. The VideoURL I was using: rtmp://myserver.net/application&id=myid, did not work. There was no particular error message that was generated, only the empty flash player.

However, I spent some time reading through the autoview.js script and found that the "Flash Video control class" is looking for a VideoURL that looks like this: rtmp://myserver.net/application/myid, so I replaced the idtag I was using "&id" with the "/" required in the VideoURL.

The streams over the Flash Media Server are working fine now.

P.S: I noticed that when I include the *.flv extension in VideoURL (rtmp://myserver.net/application/myid.flv) , that the video will not play back. It may be handy to strip the extension from the VideoURL automatically.

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rtmp:// urls need to be handled slightly differently for FlowPlayer compared to other urls. The server and directory has to be specified separately from the file name on the server, so AutoView splits this up based on the last /. My guess is that FlowPlayer can't cope with the url you initially tried in this split up format, so it might be worth doing some experiments using FlowPlayer and a static page to find out if there is a way of getting the URL to work with FlowPlayer in this format.

Why FlowPlayer seems to need to handle rtmp URL's differently is a mystery to me, I would much prefer to just be able to bang the url in as is, which would probably solve these problems. If you can find a way, please tell me, I spent a lot of time on this without any result.

As for the .flv file extensions, I'm very reluctant to strip them off automatically. Whether or not a file extension is needed is more of an implementation issue in the streaming server which you are using, as a sysadmin it is really up to you to make sure that you provide correct streaming server URL's to your users. It might be worth putting in a warning box but allowing users who really want the file extension to leave it on.

I really hate software that tries to be clever by automatically correcting anything it thinks is wrong, because there's always the 5% of circumstances when the automatic correction gets it wrong and then the user is left fighting the system to get it to accept the data they really want without the 'correction'

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