AVChat Software Product Blog

The latest build of AVChat 3, made available for download today, packs some awesome new features:

• Tool tips on most buttons in the UI.
• Better UI (you can now re size your cam and the users list, other cams are now floating on top of the text chat area,cam borders are drawn correctly, slightly skinnier interface with default padding set to 6px).
• YouTube videos now play (again) in the actual YouTube player.
• Added option in the UI to show join/leave messages in the text chat.
• Lots of small updates for the text chat (proper html encoding for html characters, better detection/highlight mechanism for links, in some cases text chat would go over YouTube videos/pictures previews).
• Some small changes to the upload mechanism in php to go around some wierd web server security settings we’ve met : “http” not allowed in GET variables, not even HTML encoded !!!
• Added a new video/audio quality profile for 768kbits/s streams .
• Ghost users should now be detected and disconnected in max 17 seconds on all 3 media servers.
• Changed the way the fps, free time, nr of viewers shows up in the cam areas.
• Clicking the [Add IT] buttn in the YT submit button now adds the video directly.
• Spaces in usernames are not replaced by _ anymore.
• New option in avc_settings.xxx to disable YouTube previews.
• Added memory usage display (off by default, you can turn it on from avc_settings.xxx)

and bug fixes:

• The info  about who is someone watching visible in admin.swf was not exact all the time.
• When cliking ACCEPT/DENY for someone’s request to your private stream some wierd text would fill up the text chat input box (bug introduced in build 609).
• Window padding value in style.css now actually works.
• Sorted out some sorting issues for the users list.
• When a  YT movie preview was shown in the chat the whole movie was downloaded even tough you weren’t watching it.
• private streams were not working on Wowza 2 (they were on Wowza 1.7)!

and some updates to security too:

• Added the possibility to add an ip range for the ips from where admin.swf is allowed to connect.
• Admins now see the ip of each user in the text chat, you can double click the ip to select it.
• The allow localhost connections option is now available for all 3 media servers: Wowza, FMIS, Red5.
• The Rooms List in admin.swf  now shows the ip of the creator of the room.
• Admin can now enter closed rooms.

How to get the new AVChat 3 release

You can obtain the latest AVChat 3 build by downloading the software again ( using the download link from the delivery/trial email) and:

• doing a clean install
  or
  
• overwrite all the old files including the FMIS/Red5 server side files and the translation files

I am pleased to announce you the immediate availability of our new flagship product: AVChat 3, the successor to AVChat 2.

Launch AVChat 3.0 Demo

View Some More Screenshots

New Technology

AVChat 3 is developed using ActionScript 3. This allows us to develop much more powerful and fast applications than before.

New Features

We’ve listened to our vocal clients and added a lot of requested features like private video streams and emote icon packs but we’ve also added a lot of new stuff we’ve thought about internally. Users will now be able to join  multiple rooms at the same time, they will be able to share YouTube movies, upload pictures to rooms, watch video streams in full screen and much more.

Webmasters and site admins have not been forgotten either, the dynamic reduction in bandwidth feature will save a lot of bandwidth on the media server, the rooms management has been rethinked and room creation is much more easier, you now have access to a lot of information about each user and the media server including total bandwidth usage.

Check out a more complete list of AVChat 3 features on the Features Tour page.

Media Server Support

AVChat 3 is now available for Flash Media Interactive Server, but support for Red5, Wowza and rtmpd will be rolled out in the following weeks.

Pricing & Upgrading from AVChat 2

Previous AVChat 2 clients

Clients who have purchased AVChat 2 within the last 3 months (starting 9 March 09), will get a free upgrade to AVChat 3.

These are the upgrade prices for clients who have purchased AVChat 2 prior to 9 March 2009 :

• Upgrade from AVChat 2.x Lite to AVChat 3.x Lite: $47.5
• AVChat 2.x 40 to AVChat 3.x 40: $87.5
• AVChat 2.x 100 to AVChat 3.x: $127.5
• AVChat 2.x Unlimited to AVChat 3.x Unlimited: $199.5

You can order your upgrade from the pricing/purchase page!

New clients

• AVChat 3.x Lite (20 simultaneous users max ): $95
• AVChat 3.x with 40 simultaneous users max: $135
• AVChat 3.x with 100 simultaneous users max: $255
• AVChat 3.x with 200 simultaneous users max: $399
• AVChat 3.x with 500 simultaneous users max: $799
• AVChat 3.x with Unlimited simultaneous users: $1249

More details on the pricing/purchase page!

Pricing for integration modules/plugins/components

We have decided to charge separately for integration modules, plugins and components because a surprising amount of work goes into developing, maintaining and supporting these extensions.

Right now we offer integration kits for Joomla 1.0 and 1.5, Drupal 5 and 6 and osDate. Kits for Social Engine and vldPersonals will soon follow. Each of them will be priced at $49 and will be available when you purchase the standalone version of AVChat 3.

What happens with AVChat 2?

We will continue to sell and support it as we have until now. No major features will be added tough, updates will include mostly bug fixing and support for new Red5/FMS versions.

This is part 2 of our 3 part series on recording high quality Flash video over slow connections.

As explained in the first part, a big buffer should be used in the recorder flash app so that the video and audio data has where to wait before its turn comes to travel to the media server.

When the user stops the recording (by pressing a STOP button for example) most probably there still is some audio & video data in the buffer, data that has not been sent yet to the media server.

Part 2: wait for the audio and video data to reach the media server before we display any SUCCESS message to the user

Otherwise you will most probably end up with videos with missing endings and frustrated users.

Heres how stopping a recording unfolds in our flash video recorder:

1. STOP button is pressed (or recording time limit is reached)
2. we stop capturing data from the cam and mic
3. we display a SAVING VIDEO message until the buffer is empty (all the data in the buffer is sent to the server)
4. when the buffer reaches 0 we finally display the recording saved properly success message.

In code (as2) Step 2 translates in ns.attachAudio(null) followed by ns.attachVideo(null).

Step 3 and 4 (detecting when all the data has reached the media server ) can be done in several ways but we listen for a NetStream.Buffer.Empty or NetStream.Record.Stop net status event fired while ns.bufferLength == 0 .

In as3 the procedure should be similar.

In part 1 we’ve talked about using a big buffer on the client side.

In part 3 we will talk about getting the media server to properly save the video and audio data to the HDD.

Adobe released last week FMS 3.5 and FMLE 3.0 which you can now download and/or purchase. There are several interesting new features which you can read about here:

• New features in Flash Media Live Encoder 3.0
• New features in FMSS 3.5 and FMIS 3.5

Prices remain unchanged with $4500 for FMIS and $995 for FMSS. Because this is not a new major version upgrade prices are rather cheap with $349 for the FMIS 3.0 to 3.5 upgrade and $249 ofr the FMSS 3.0 to 3.5 upgrade. These prices are available in the US store.

The FMLE continues to be free.

Adobe has released today Flash Media Server 3.

FMS 3 is available in 3 editions:

1. Flash Media Streaming Server ($995)
2. Flash Media Interactive Server ($4500)
3. Flash Media Development Server (free, 10 simultaneous connections limit)

You can find a side by side comparison of the 3 editions here but the most important new features from my opinion are:

1. Limitations on bandwidth and connections limit have been lifted
2. More secure content delivery (rtmpe, swf hashing)
3. H.264 video and HE-AAC audio
4. Audio/Video stream delivery to Flash Lite 3
5. Major improvements in performance
6. AMF3 support and new plugin arhitecture

AVChat and AVConference should work without any issues with FMS3 as a media server should you choose to use it.

More links:
Flash Media Server 3 Product Page on the Adobe website
Flash Media Development Server download page (you need an Adobe account)
FMS3 Developer Center on the Adobe website