Developers - get the player source code
Autobahn HD for Flash® plays standard video encodings using the standard Flash® player from a standard web server. To enable the Adaptive Bitrate Streaming for your content you’ll need to provide some metadata to allow Autobahn to find and choose among the alternate encodings. Before we launch into creating those let’s look at the various moving parts:
Flash Player: Adobe’s Flash® player is available for easy installation as a plug-in for all major browsers on all major platforms.
Flash Encoded Video: Video content stored in Adobe’s FLV format with the .flv extension. Autobahn HD’s Adaptive Bitrate Streaming currently supports both VP6 and Sorensen codecs with more coming soon. All your standard tools for creating FLV files work great with Autobahn HD.
Autobahn HD: Swarmcast’s client side plugin adds Acceleration, Adaptive Bitrate Streaming, and Playback Skip-Ahead to the Flash video experience.
Autobahn HD Player for Flash: Our Flash based video player uses Autobahn HD to provide robust playback with enhanced features. It can be used as a basis for your own player or as an example of how your Flash player can take advantage of the advances made possible using Autobahn HD.
Media Group Descriptor: An XML document that describes all the available encodings for a piece of content (the media group), their bitrates, and the location of each one’s Swarmcast Media Metadata file.
Swarmcast Media Metadata: A file with the .smm extension that provides information about a specific video file necessary to switch into that encoded video during playback and is created using the Swarmcast Media Indexer.
Swarmcast Media Indexer: Provided by Swarmcast the tool creates Swarmcast Media Metadata files from encoded videos.
Web Server: All the encoded videos, Media Group Descriptors, and Swarmcast Media Metadata files need to be hosted on a standard HTTP server such as Apache or IIS. There’s no custom server side software or configuration required at all. If you’re looking for help hosting your HD files economically contact us and we can help you out.
Whew. That might seem like a lot of required components, but most of them you already have the rest are easily created using free tools Swarmcast provides.
Now, let’s take a look at the steps required to make your video available through Autobahn HD. They might seem involved at first, but fear not, nothing below is outside the comfort zone of any web developer worth his or her salt.
Step 1: Create multiple FLV encodings of your video asset and upload them to your web server.
Step 2: Create a Swarmcast Media Metadata file for each of your encodings and upload them to your web server.
Step 3: Use the Swarmcast Player Wizard to create a Media Group Descriptor and Embed/Object tag and place it on your web page.
We’ll take a look at each of those steps in detail subsequent postings.
