Hi Everybody

Thanks for visiting the site. Consider this post a sort of introduction as to what is happening here and what the site is all about.

Of course you can read the about us part, but I have a few more thoughts to put out.

So this site is primarily about Flash Media Server. There is currently a lack of information on the internet and a lot of people have made that clear to me through private emails, on forums and blogs along with comments on my blog. I've done a bit to alleviate that with my "ask an FMS guru" idea on the blog, but it just wasn't seeming to cut in some ways. You can only explain things to a certain extent with just text.

Hence why this site concentrates mostly on video tutorials. This gives the new (and some old) FMS developer a bit of a better idea of the process that somebody might go through to create FMS/Flash apps. At least, hopefully it does :)

I'm really hoping to get quite a few tutorials out that address real issues and real problems and confusion that many new FMS developers come across. I've heard and seen a lot on blogs, forums, comments and emails like I've said above and think that perhaps I have a decent idea on what to write about. I myself have been through the pain of figuring out what shared objects, net streams, net connections, calling clients from clients, from the server, managing clients and keeping bandwidth/cpu/memory usage down. Hopefully I can pass on some of that info to the visitors of this site.

If you have good or bad comments, please post them. I'm always looking for any kind of input. The good stuff is most definitely appreciated and has a profound effect on getting this site running, and the bad stuff will help me be better. Don't hold back :)

Anyways, I'll keep updating this thread as things move forward and ideas come about.

Again, thanks for visiting and checking the site out. I hope it helps.

On a side note, if you're up to contributing then please let me know. This site is up for the community and I'm more than happy to have the community support it too.

Just a quick update to let everybody know that there is a new video tutorial on the way. It'll be covering the send() methods on a netStream object and the send() method on the sharedObject object. Pretty handy, basic but good information I think. I'll post an update again when it's up.

The new tutorial is up now, this one covers the send() method of the shared objects and net streams. Pretty interesting, but just covers the basics.

On a side note (and I'm surprised nobody told me) I've fixed the tutorial player because it seems that it was playing the first tutorial in the player instead of the selected tutorial. Sorry about that.

Another glitch fixed now. It seems the confirmation email for new membership was showing the wrong URL for the membership confirmation page. That has been fixed now.

Everybody who registered up to this point has been confirmed manually. Sorry about that. You should be able to post now.

Just thought I'd post that I have another tutorial coming up pretty soon. It's about controlling streams from the server side that are coming from the client side. Pretty interesting I think and will hopefully give people more of an idea of the power of the server side coding.

I'll post again when it's up.

I almost forgot, I've updated the links page with some new links that are a must look at for any FMS dev. If you happen to know of some good sites, please let me know. I don't claim to know them all and rarely go run around looking. If somebody does tell me about something really cool, I'll definitely go check it out.

Just thought I'd post that I should have a new tutorial up pretty soon on communicating between the client to server and server to client and client to client. All round communicating techniques kind of tutorial. Just covering the basics, but I plan to have this tutorial lead into others that take advantage of the knowledge gained from this tutorial.

Happy New Year everybody! Thanks for visiting fmsguru.com to learn more about Flash Media Server. 2007 was a good year being that it's the year that this site was thought of, created and implemented.

Anyways, you may have noticed that things are slow around here for new tutorials. The thing is that I have caught a bit of a cold and would end up coughing through the tutorial or just plain sounding raspy. Nobody likes tutorials like that..

So, when I get a bit better I'll get back to putting new stuff up. Got lots of ideas so there is no shortage of material to make tutorials about.

On a side note, I'd like to ask all users that you don't cross post across forums. I'm noticing that some people are posting here and over at flashcomguru.com with the exact same post. Please don't, pick one forum and wait patiently. If the cross posting keeps up for a particular user, then I'll delete the user that is doing it. I don't mind good questions here of course, but it's no use posting in both forums. Thanks for understanding :)

I've had a couple of people mention that the videos are streaming a little slow and stopping often which makes them slightly unviewable. Of course it will depend on your bandwidth but for the time being until I can get in some dynamic buffering, I've increased the buffer time so that more video can get into the buffer for slower connections.

I'll do my best to get some time this week to update the player for dynamic buffering so that it will automatically detect that your connection sucks or not.

Just thought I'd quickly mention that I've changed hosting for the tutorials to Influxis http://www.influxis.com. They've offered to host the tutorials for some publicity which I happily agreed to. It certainly wasn't costing me before with our own server so I'm not saving any money or anything, but it will take a slight load off of my server which isn't too bad I think.

Anyways, a big thanks to Influxis for the offer! If any of you have troubles viewing the tutorials then let me know right away here on the forum or the contact page and I'll pass on the info and get 'er fixed.

So Flash Media Server 3 was released today. Go get it here: http://www.adobe.com/go/tryflashmediaserver

I'll most likely get a tutorial up about it in the next day or two. Maybe even today if I'm up to it :)

Along with that big release of FMS3, we've been making some progress on the progress of this site.

We're getting ready to get a bit of advertising revenue (server/license/BW is expensive) and so the banner/menu up top is being slightly changed along with finally getting it into the forum. I actually had quite a bit of trouble getting it to render in this forum.. not sure why. Anyways, it's not perfect yet but we're almost there.

Also, if you hang out for a few seconds or so on the home page you'll see a quick animation in the menu area that I put together yesterday in After Effects. Gives it a nice touch I think :)

Last but not least, with the release of FMS3 I've put a new category to post in, this is for FMS3 stuff only: http://www.fmsguru.com/forum/forums.cfm?conferenceid=B358067E-2004-C4F4-F500BCB731BB1593

The other FMS stuff can go in FMS2. Not sure how many people won't upgrade (I can't imagine anybody not upgrading with the new licensing scheme in place for fms3), but I'll keep an eye on things. It may not even be required to split them up. We'll see.

Anyways, stay tuned for more updates and minor changes along with some great tutorials and articles about FMS3!

You suggest, I listen. Due to popular demand:

An RSS feed for the tutorials :)

http://www.fmsguru.com/rss/fmsguru_tutorials_rss.cfm

Please let me know if there are any problems of course, but it looks pretty good to me.

I've got two updates for the site. The first one is that I've added an Adobe Media Player RSS feed to the tutorials so that the videos can be viewed in the Adobe Media Player. This is handy because you can download the videos and watch them offline if you want. Here is that RSS feed:

http://www.fmsguru.com/rss/amp_rss.cfm

Just go to "favorites" and then down at the bottom there is a "add an RSS feed" button. Click that and put in the above RSS feed URL. It's that easy, should just work from there.

Going to get an iTunes podcast running soon too. I'll post again when I have that up and running.

Second item is that the tutorial player can be full screened now. You will need the flash player 9 to do it, but I figure anybody that is coming here to view tutorials most likely has it. If not, you should get it :). There is a button that says "toggle full screen" at the bottom of the player. Reasonably simple impementation at the moment but should be good for those with laptops and the tutorials don't quite fit on the screen with the browser address bar etc in the way.

Well, you all may have noticed that updates have been a bit slim lately. I've been up to my eyeballs in work this past 3 weeks with more and more coming in as I write this. It's crazy, lots of FMS work out there.

So, on that note, it looks like it'll be another week or so before I can get some time to put up a tutorial or article. I'm hoping I will be able to find a bit of time maybe this weekend or perhaps one of these evenings, but I'm not sure. Maybe I can put together a couple of shorter tutorials.. instead of my usual 20 to 30 minute ones. We'll see. Either way though, don't worry! the site has not been abandoned or anything, just a bit on the busy side at the moment.

Just wanted to let everybody know that there are tutorials in the works. The next one will be about making a simple chat application with more interesting stuff on the way after that.

We've also got plans to make some really serious tutorials for those that are looking for more advanced stuff. Stay tuned for updates on those! We're pretty excited about getting them out along with some example files that you can actually use in your own sites and projects etc.

Just did some quick math and it seems at 18 tutorials there is about 6.5 hours of free training on FMS here! That's amazing.. I didn't realize I talked so much.

More coming up with some new products coming too to provide very affordable FMS applications that people can learn from. I'm pretty excited at our future plans here at fmsguru.com, more on that soon.

It's been a while since the last tutorial here but I've got lots planned still. Had to head off to an Adobe Community Experts conference all last week, so lost time there.. combined with the fact that there is so much work out there for FMS that I'm practically giving it away to those who ask for it. It's crazy..

Anyways, I should have a couple of shorter tutorials up pretty quick. Definitely one tomorrow afternoon and then the following one should be up a few days later if all goes as planned.

Bit of a delay but that tutorial is up now.

I've also added a forum for jobs or work wanted. Check that out here because we've already got one post in it.

Just a couple of quick items here. First up is that I'm looking for more input on what language people want to see tutorials in. Here's that link to the thread:

http://www.fmsguru.com/forum/messages.cfm?threadid=510FE631-0186-767E-C8C629C4F93A5BBB

Please post something when you have a moment.

We've finally got a couple of products to sell here on FMSGuru.com. One of them is a video chat application and the other is a video email application. We've had these around for a while but have had trouble on where we can sell them from. Paypal has been notoriously dangerous for fraud and most online stores are either too expensive or too difficult to get into. We went with kagi.com, hopefully it works out well. The sales of these products will be going directly into this site to keep it running and up to date with lots of cool knowledge and helpful material. Your support would be very much appreciated!

Either way, there are lots more things (tutorials, articles and products) coming down the pipe and I'm really looking forward to getting more up here for you all to check out. Thanks for visiting everybody.