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Real-Time Messaging Protocol

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Real-Time Messaging Protocol ( RTMP ) is a communication protocol for streaming audio, video, and data over the Internet. Originally developed as a proprietary protocol by Macromedia for streaming between Flash Player and the Flash Communication Server, Adobe (which acquired Macromedia) has released an incomplete version of the specification of the protocol for public use.

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93-540: The RTMP protocol has multiple variations: While the primary motivation for RTMP was to be a protocol for playing Flash video , it is also used in some other applications, such as the Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES . RTMP is a TCP-based protocol which maintains persistent connections and allows low-latency communication. To deliver streams smoothly and transmit as much information as possible, it splits streams into fragments, and their size

186-653: A non-disclosure agreement to view it in 2008. Adobe also created the Open Screen Project which removes licensing fees and opens data protocols for Flash. Adobe has also open-sourced many components relating to Flash. Adobe has not been willing to make complete source code of the Flash Player available for free software development and even though free and open source alternatives such as Shumway and Gnash have been built, they are no longer under active development. On May 1, 2008, Adobe announced

279-484: A "lite" version of the Flash authoring tool targeted to new users who only wanted to do a basic drawing, animation, and interactivity. The Basic product was eventually stopped. On December 3, 2005, Adobe Systems acquired Macromedia alongside its product line which included Flash, Dreamweaver , Director / Shockwave , Fireworks , and Authorware . In 2007, Adobe's first version release was Adobe Flash CS3 Professional ,

372-444: A central part of it. Disney Online used FutureSplash animations for their subscription-based service Disney's Daily Blast. Fox Broadcasting Company launched The Simpsons using FutureSplash. In December 1996, FutureSplash was acquired by Macromedia, and Macromedia re-branded and released FutureSplash Animator as Macromedia Flash 1.0 . Flash was a two-part system, a graphics and animation editor known as Macromedia Flash, and

465-401: A connection to be established. An example message from the client is: The Flash Media Server and other implementations uses the concept of an "app" to conceptually define a container for audio/video and other content, implemented as a folder on the server root which contains the media files to be streamed. The first variable contains the name of this app as "sample" which is the name provided by

558-491: A generic Action-script Object, which is then passed to the NetConnection event listener. The clientId will establish a number for the session to be started by the connection. Object encoding must match the value previously set. To start a video stream, the client sends a "createStream" invocation followed by a ping message, followed by a "play" invocation with the file name as argument. The server will then reply with

651-728: A growth of 3D content for product demonstrations and virtual tours. In 2007, YouTube offered videos in HTML5 format to support the iPhone and iPad , which did not support Flash Player. After a controversy with Apple , Adobe stopped developing Flash Player for Mobile, focusing its efforts on Adobe AIR applications and HTML5 animation. In 2015, Google introduced Google Swiffy , a tool that converted Flash animation to HTML5, which Google used to automatically convert Flash web ads for mobile devices. In 2016, Google discontinued Swiffy and its support. In 2015, YouTube switched to HTML5 technology on most devices by default; however, YouTube supported

744-531: A header and a body which, in the case of connection and control commands, is encoded using the Action Message Format (AMF). The header is split into the Basic Header (shown as detached from the rest, in the diagram) and Chunk Message Header . The Basic Header is the only constant part of the packet and is usually composed of a single composite byte, where the two most significant bits are

837-515: A number of other Adobe Systems and 3rd party tools. It has support for a scripting language called ActionScript , which can be used to display Flash Video from an SWF file. Because the Flash Player runs as a browser plug-in , it is possible to embed Flash Video in web pages and view the video within a web browser. Flash Player supported display of Flash Video files since version 6, with the Sorenson Spark and On VP6 video codecs. Support

930-450: A one byte value with a NULL value indicating that the payload contains MPEG-4 configuration details. MPEG-4 video encodings also add three bytes for composition timestamp offset which is required for encodings that use B-frames. Audio encodings enumerated from 0 are: Audio encodings enumerated from 10 are: Audio encodings enumerated from 14 are MPEG layer 3 8 kHz, Device specific such as MIDI . Audio processing parameters with

1023-662: A player known as Macromedia Flash Player. FutureSplash Animator was an animation tool originally developed for pen-based computing devices. Due to the small size of the FutureSplash Viewer , it was particularly suited for download on the Web. Macromedia distributed Flash Player as a free browser plugin in order to quickly gain market share. By 2005, more computers worldwide had Flash Player installed than any other Web media format, including Java , QuickTime , RealNetworks , and Windows Media Player . Macromedia upgraded

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1116-474: A possible extension of one byte which sets the Limit Type. This can have one of three possible values which can be: hard, soft or dynamic (either soft or hard). The value received in the four bytes of the body. A default value of 128 bytes exists, and the message is sent only when a change is wanted. After establishing a TCP connection, an RTMP connection is established first, performing a handshake through

1209-481: A proprietary variant of the H.263 video standard, under the name of Sorenson Spark ( FourCC FLV1). Sorenson Spark is an older codec for FLV files but it is also a widely available and compatible one, because it was the first video codec supported in Flash Player. It is the required video compression format for Flash Player 6 and 7. Flash Player 8 and newer revisions also support the playback of On2 TrueMotion VP6 video bit streams (FourCC VP6F or FLV4). On2 VP6

1302-415: A reply. The value can be either a string like in the example above or one or more objects, each composed of a set of key/value pairs where the keys are always encoded as strings while the values can be any AMF data type, including complex types like arrays. Control messages are not AMF encoded. They start with a stream Id of 0x02 which implies a full (type 0) header and have a message type of 0x04. The header

1395-593: A series of "onStatus" commands followed by the video data as encapsulated within RTMP messages. After a connection is established, media is sent by encapsulating the content of FLV tags into RTMP messages of type 8 and 9 for audio and video, respectively. This refers to the HTTP tunneled version of the protocol. It communicates over port 80 and passes the AMF data inside HTTP POST request and responses. The sequence for connection

1488-536: A standard header which is shown below: After the header, the file is split into packets called "FLV tags", which have 15-byte packet headers. The first four bytes denote the size of the previous packet/tag (including the header without the first field), and aid in seeking backward. The Packet Type byte of a packet/tag header is based on the RTMP message ID byte with the AMF metadata value of 18 (0x12), video payload value of 9 (0x09) and audio payload value of 8 (0x08) being

1581-425: Is 0x05 (null) which means there are no arguments. Some of the message types shown above, such as Ping and Set Client/Server Bandwidth, are considered low level RTMP protocol messages which do not use the AMF encoding format. Command messages on the other hand, whether AMF0 (Message Type of 0x14) or AMF3 (0x11), use the format and have the general form shown below: The transaction id is used for commands that can have

1674-413: Is a channel for handling RPC requests and responses, a channel for video stream data, a channel for audio stream data, a channel for out-of-band control messages (fragment size negotiation, etc.), and so on. During a typical RTMP session, several channels may be active simultaneously at any given time. When RTMP data is encoded, a packet header is generated. The packet header specifies, amongst other matters,

1767-713: Is a discontinued multimedia software platform used for production of animations , rich internet applications , desktop applications , mobile apps , mobile games , and embedded web browser video players. Flash displays text, vector graphics , and raster graphics to provide animations, video games, and applications. It allows streaming of audio and video , and can capture mouse, keyboard, microphone, and camera input. Artists may produce Flash graphics and animations using Adobe Animate (formerly known as Adobe Flash Professional). Software developers may produce applications and video games using Adobe Flash Builder , FlashDevelop, Flash Catalyst , or any text editor combined with

1860-637: Is a fork of RTMPdump, without the code, which Adobe claims violates the DMCA in the USA. This was developed as a response to Adobe's attempt in 2008 to suppress RTMPdump. FLVstreamer is an RTMP client that will save a stream of audio or video content from any RTMP server to disk, if encryption (RTMPE) is not enabled on the stream. Flash video container in RTMP is limited to H264 codec in most implementations. For this reason, The Veovera Software Organization, including Adobe , Google , Twitch , and Veriskope published

1953-448: Is a polling request where the session id has been generated and returned from the server and the sequence is just a number that increments by one for every request. The appropriate response is a 200 OK, with an integer returned in the body signifying the interval time. AMF data is sent through /send/<session id>/<sequence #> RTMP is implemented at these three stages: The open-source RTMP client command-line tool rtmpdump

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2046-595: Is a type of media player that is used for playing Flash video from PC as well as from Internet websites. An FLV player can be used standalone, without the need of the Adobe Flash authoring or developmental tools. It can also be embedded in the website using Flash component or embeddable version of FLV player. Adobe Flash Player is a multimedia and application player originally developed by Macromedia and acquired by Adobe Systems . It plays SWF files, which can be created by Adobe Flash Professional , Apache Flex , or

2139-580: Is an encoding format designed for screencasts . Both these formats are bitmap tile based, can be lossy by reducing color depths and are compressed using zlib . The second version is only playable in Flash Player 8 and newer. Audio in Flash Video files is usually encoded as MP3. However, audio in Flash Video FLV files recorded from the user's microphone use the proprietary Nellymoser Asao Codec . (Flash Player 10 released in 2008 also supports

2232-420: Is as follows: The first request has an /fcs/ident2 path, and the correct reply is a 404 Not Found error. The client then sends an /open/1 request where the server must reply with a 200 ok appending a random number that will be used as the session identifier for the said communication. In this example, 1728724019 is returned in the response body. From now on, the /idle/<session id>/<sequence #>

2325-514: Is designed to play back or save to disk the full RTMP stream, including the RTMPE protocol Adobe uses for encryption. RTMPdump runs on Linux, Android, Solaris, Mac OS X , and most other Unix-derived operating systems, as well as Microsoft Windows. Originally supporting all versions of 32-bit Windows including Windows 98, from version 2.2 the software will run only on Windows XP and above (although earlier versions remain fully functional). Packages of

2418-475: Is followed by six bytes, which are interpreted as such: The first two bytes of the message body define the Ping Type, which can apparently take six possible values. Pong is the name for a reply to a Ping, with the values used as seen above. This relates to messages that have to do with the client up-stream and server down-stream bit-rate. The body is composed of four bytes showing the bandwidth value, with

2511-511: Is negotiated dynamically between the client and server. Sometimes, it is kept unchanged; the default fragment sizes are 64 bytes for audio data, and 128 bytes for video data and most other data types. Fragments from different streams may then be interleaved, and multiplexed over a single connection. With longer data chunks, the protocol thus carries only a one-byte header per fragment, so incurring very little overhead . However, in practice, individual fragments are not typically interleaved. Instead,

2604-467: Is not required. RTMP sessions may be encrypted using either of two methods: In RTMP Tunneled (RTMPT), RTMP data is encapsulated and exchanged via HTTP , and messages from the client (the media player, in this case) are addressed to port 80 (the default for HTTP) on the server. While the messages in RTMPT are larger than the equivalent non-tunneled RTMP messages due to HTTP headers, RTMPT may facilitate

2697-432: Is the preferred video compression format for use with Flash Player 8 and higher. On2 VP6 can provide a higher visual quality than Sorenson Spark, especially when using lower bit rates . On the other hand, it is computationally more complex and therefore will not run as well on certain older system configurations. The Flash Video FLV file format supports two versions of a so-called 'screenshare' (Screen video) codec which

2790-419: Is vague as to which patents apply to RTMP, U.S. patent 7,246,356 appears to be one of them. In 2011, Adobe did sue Wowza Media Systems claiming, among other things, infringement of their RTMP patents. In 2015, Adobe and Wowza announced that the lawsuits have been settled and dismissed with prejudice. Packets are sent over a TCP connection, which is established first between client and server. They contain

2883-529: The objectEncoding which will define whether the rest of the communication will make use of the extended AMF3 format or not. As version 3 is the current default, the flash client has to be told explicitly in Action-script code to use AMF0 if that is requested. The server then replies with a ServerBW, a ClientBW and a SetPacketSize message sequence, finally followed by an Invoke, with an example message. Some values above are serialised into properties of

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2976-473: The Adobe AIR platform. The Flash Player was deprecated in 2017 and officially discontinued at the end of 2020 for all users outside mainland China, as well as non-enterprise users, with many web browsers and operating systems scheduled to remove the Flash Player software around the same time. Adobe continues to develop Adobe Animate, which supports web standards such as HTML5 instead of the Flash format. In

3069-590: The Apache Flex SDK. End users view Flash content via Flash Player (for web browsers), Adobe AIR (for desktop or mobile apps ), or third-party players such as Scaleform (for video games). Adobe Flash Player (which is available on Microsoft Windows , macOS , and Linux ) enables end users to view Flash content using web browsers . Adobe Flash Lite enabled viewing Flash content on older smartphones , but since has been discontinued and superseded by Adobe AIR. The ActionScript programming language allows

3162-454: The C programming language . In particular, the main functionality was built into a library (librtmp) which can easily be used by other applications. The RTMPdump developers have also written support for librtmp for MPlayer , FFmpeg , XBMC , cURL , VLC and a number of other open source software projects. Use of librtmp provides these projects with full support of RTMP in all its variants without any additional development effort. FLVstreamer

3255-555: The Open Screen Project , with the intent of providing a consistent application interface across devices such as personal computers, mobile devices , and consumer electronics . When the project was announced, seven goals were outlined: the abolition of licensing fees for Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR , the removal of restrictions on the use of the Shockwave Flash ( SWF ) and Flash Video (FLV) file formats ,

3348-660: The Payload Data , then four bytes for the Timestamp in milliseconds (with the last byte used to extend the first three bytes), the next 3 bytes for the Stream ID (incremented for multiple streams of the same type), and finally followed by the actual payload data. There is a direct relation between the fields encountered in an FLV Tag and those found in a RTMP packet , as for example the FLV Packet Type field uses

3441-565: The Sorenson Spark or VP6 video compression formats . As of 2010 public releases of Flash Player (collaboration between Adobe Systems and MainConcept ) also support H.264 video and HE-AAC audio. All of these compression formats are restricted by patents. Flash Video is viewable on most operating systems via the Adobe Flash Player and web browser plugin or one of several third-party programs. Apple's iOS devices, along with almost all other mobile devices, do not support

3534-665: The Speedtest.net web service conducted over 9.0 billion speed tests with a utility built with Adobe Flash. In 2016, the service shifted to HTML5 due to the decreasing availability of Adobe Flash Player on PCs. Developers could create rich internet applications and browser plugin -based applets in ActionScript 3.0 programming language with IDEs , including Adobe Flash Builder, FlashDevelop and Powerflasher FDT . Flex applications were typically built using Flex frameworks such as PureMVC. Flash video games were popular on

3627-518: The open source Speex codec. ) FLV files also support uncompressed audio or ADPCM format audio. Recent versions of Flash Player 9 support AAC ( HE-AAC / AAC SBR , AAC Main Profile, and AAC-LC). Support for encoding Flash Video files is provided by an encoding tool included with Adobe's Flash Professional and Creative Suite products, On2 's Flix encoding tools, Sorenson Squeeze , FFmpeg and other third-party tools. Supported media types in both

3720-578: The rtmpdump suite of software are available in the major open-source repositories (Linux distributions). These include the front-end apps "rtmpdump", "rtmpsrv" and "rtmpsuck." Development of RTMPdump was restarted in October 2009, outside the United States, at the MPlayer site. The current version features greatly improved functionality, and has been rewritten to take advantage of the benefits of

3813-467: The "epoch" timestamp, but since this can be set to zero, as is done in third party implementations, the packet can be simplified. The client initialises the connection by sending the C0 packet with a constant value of 0x03 representing the current protocol version. It follows straight with C1 without waiting for S0 to be received first which contains 1536 bytes, with the first four representing the epoch timestamp,

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3906-561: The Adobe Flash Media Server. One way to feed data to Flash Media Server is from files in the FLV file format. Flash Player can play SWF files created for Flash Player 7 and later versions in FLV format directly (MIME type video/x-flv). Flash Player can also play the new F4V file format, beginning with SWF files created for Flash Player 9 Update 3. Commonly, Flash Video FLV files contain video bit streams which are

3999-641: The Chunk Type ( fmt in the specification) and the rest form the Stream ID. Depending on the value of the former, some fields of the Message Header can be omitted, and their value derived from previous packets while depending on the value of the latter, the Basic Header can be extended with one or two extra bytes (as in the case of the diagramme that has three bytes in total (c)). If the value of

4092-617: The F4V format shares a common base with the MP4 format, which is why F4V is sometimes informally called "Flash MP4". Flash Player does not check the filename extension but instead examines the file to determine the format of the thing created. The new file formats are very different from the older FLV file format. For example, F4V does not support Screen video, Sorenson Spark, VP6 video compression formats and ADPCM, or Nellymoser audio compression formats. Authors of Flash Player strongly encourage use of

4185-499: The F4V, MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14), M4V, M4A, 3GP and MOV multimedia container formats , 3GPP Timed Text specification (MPEG-4 Part 17) which is a standardized subtitle format and partial parsing support for the 'ilst' atom which is the ID3 equivalent iTunes uses to store metadata . MPEG-4 Part 2 video (e.g. created with DivX or Xvid) is not supported. In an interview with BBC News , the main programmer of Flash Jonathan Gay said that

4278-622: The Flash Player plugin and so require other delivery methods such as provided by the Adobe Flash Media Server . The 2002 release of Flash Player 6 added support for video in the SWF file format. The 2003 release of Flash Player 7 added direct support for the FLV file format. Because of restrictions in the FLV file format, Adobe Systems created new file formats in 2007, based on the ISO base media file format (MPEG-4 Part 12). In this way,

4371-568: The Flash Video and ISO base media file formats: Supported media types in just the Flash Video file format: Supported media types in just the ISO base media file format: An FLV converter is a type of video conversion software that is used for turning videos from different formats into FLV. Below is a list of popular free video converters which support conversion to FLV. These programs run under Microsoft Windows . HandBrake, FFmpeg and VLC also run under Mac OS X and Linux . FLV files start with

4464-538: The Flash player installed, and that they would not be releasing a version of Flash certified for use with Android version 4.1, codenamed Jelly Bean . Flash Video files can be delivered in several different ways: It is possible to record online flash videos using stream recorders and screen video capture software . The former gives lossless results, while the latter allows recording any video even when anti- leeching measures are used. Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash )

4557-399: The Flash system between 1996 and 1999 adding MovieClips, Actions (the precursor to ActionScript), Alpha transparency, and other features. As Flash matured, Macromedia's focus shifted from marketing it as a graphics and media tool to promoting it as a Web application platform, adding scripting and data access capabilities to the player while attempting to retain its small footprint. In 2000,

4650-473: The Flash timeline. Other features of Flash CS5 are a new text engine (TLF), new document templates, further improvement to inverse kinematics , new Deco tool effects, live FLV playback preview, and the code snippets panel. Adobe has taken steps to reduce or eliminate Flash licensing costs. For instance, the SWF file format documentation is provided free of charge after they relaxed the requirement of accepting

4743-468: The Flash-based video player for older web browsers and devices until 2017. After Flash 5 introduced ActionScript in 2000, developers combined the visual and programming capabilities of Flash to produce interactive experiences and applications for the Web. Such Web-based applications eventually became known as "Rich Internet Applications" and later "Rich Web Applications". In 2004, Macromedia Flex

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4836-455: The ID of the channel on which it is to be sent, a timestamp of when it was generated (if necessary), and the size of the packet's payload. This header is then followed by the actual payload content of the packet, which is fragmented according to the currently agreed-upon fragment size before it is sent over the connection. The packet header itself is never fragmented, and its size does not count towards

4929-838: The Internet, with portals like Newgrounds , Kongregate , and Armor Games dedicated to hosting Flash-based games. Many Flash games were developed by individuals or groups of friends due to the simplicity of the software. Popular Flash games include Farmville , Alien Hominid , QWOP , Club Penguin , and Dofus . Adobe introduced various technologies to help build video games, including Adobe AIR (to release games for desktop or mobile platforms), Adobe Scout (to improve performance), CrossBridge (to convert C++-based games to run in Flash), and Stage3D (to support GPU-accelerated video games). 3D frameworks like Away3D and Flare3D simplified creation of 3D content for Flash. Adobe AIR allows

5022-503: The RTMP Header (including the values in the example packet above) are decoded as follows: The Message Type ID byte defines whether the packet contains audio/video data, a remote object or a command. Some possible values for are: Following the header, 0x02 denotes a string of size 0x000C and values 0x63 0x72 ... 0x6D ("createStream" command). Following that we have a 0x00 (number) which is the transaction id of value 2.0. The last byte

5115-461: The Wowza Server for their testing. The flashVer string is the same as returned by the Action-script getversion() function. The audioCodec and videoCodec are encoded as doubles and their meaning can be found in the original spec. The same is true for the videoFunction variable, which in this case is the self-explanatory SUPPORT_VID_CLIENT_SEEK constant. Of special interest is

5208-576: The company had wanted to use H.264 when video support was originally added to Flash, but had been deterred by the patent licensing fees of around $ 5 million (£3.5 million) per year. Flash Player supports two distinct modes of video playback: Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Unix-based Mac OS devices can play flash videos in QuickTime with the help of additional software (such as the open source Perian component.) Windows Mobile, Palm OS–based The iPhone and Android devices can play flash videos with

5301-1090: The creation of Flash-based mobile games , which may be published to the Google Play and Apple app stores. Flash is also used to build interfaces and HUDs for 3D video games using Scaleform GFx , a technology that renders Flash content within non-Flash video games. Scaleform is supported by more than 10 major video game engines including Unreal Engine 3 , CryEngine , and PhyreEngine , and has been used to provide 3D interfaces for more than 150 major video game titles since its launch in 2003. Notable users of Flash include DHX Media Vancouver for productions including Pound Puppies , Littlest Pet Shop and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic , Fresh TV for Total Drama , Nelvana for 6teen and Clone High , Williams Street for Metalocalypse and Squidbillies , Nickelodeon Animation Studio for El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera , Starz Media for Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! , Ankama Animation for Wakfu: The Animated Series , among others. The precursor to Flash

5394-452: The data in the packet's first fragment. In other words, only the actual packet payload (the media data) is subject to fragmentation. At a higher level, the RTMP encapsulates MP3 or AAC audio and FLV1 video multimedia streams, and can make remote procedure calls (RPCs) using the Action Message Format . Any RPC services required are made asynchronously, using a single client/server request/response model, such that real-time communication

5487-490: The development of interactive animations, video games, web applications, desktop applications, and mobile applications. Programmers can implement Flash software using an IDE such as Adobe Animate, Adobe Flash Builder, Adobe Director , FlashDevelop, and Powerflasher FDT . Adobe AIR enables full-featured desktop and mobile applications to be developed with Flash and published for Windows , macOS , Android , iOS , Xbox One , PlayStation 4 , Wii U , and Nintendo Switch . Flash

5580-741: The early 2000s, Flash was widely installed on desktop computers , and was often used to display interactive web pages and online games , and to play video and audio content. In 2005, YouTube was founded by former PayPal employees, and it used Adobe Flash Player as a means to display compressed video content on the web. Between 2000 and 2010, numerous businesses used Flash-based websites to launch new products, or to create interactive company portals. Notable users include Nike , Hewlett-Packard (more commonly known as HP), Nokia , General Electric , World Wildlife Fund , HBO , Cartoon Network , Disney , and Motorola . After Adobe introduced hardware-accelerated 3D for Flash ( Stage3D ), Flash websites saw

5673-575: The enhanced RTMP specification, which adds support for VP9 , H265 and AV1 codecs in the Flash Video container FLV . Flash video Flash Video is a container file format used to deliver digital video content (e.g., TV shows , movies , etc.) over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player version 6 and newer. Flash Video content may also be embedded within SWF files. There are two different Flash Video file formats: FLV and F4V . The audio and video data within FLV files are encoded in

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5766-403: The exchange of three packets from each side (also referred to as Chunks in the official documentation). These are referred in the official spec as C0-2 for the client sent packets and S0-2 for the server side respectively and are not to be confused with RTMP packets that can be exchanged only after the handshake is complete. These packets have a structure of their own and C1 contains a field setting

5859-578: The first major version of ActionScript was developed, and released with Flash 5 . Actionscript 2.0 was released with Flash MX 2004 and supported object-oriented programming , improved UI components and other programming features. The last version of Flash released by Macromedia was Flash 8 , which focused on graphical upgrades such as filters (blur, drop shadow, etc.), blend modes (similar to Adobe Photoshop ), and advanced features for FLV video . Animator Flash 1 Flash 2 Flash 3 Flash 4 Flash 5 Flash MX (6) Flash MX 2004 (7) ActionScript 2.0

5952-494: The first two bits for the sampling rate, next bit flags 16-bit sample size on with off indicating 8-bit sample size, and the final bit flags stereophonic channels on with off indicating monaural only. Sampling rates enumerated from 0 are 5.5 kHz, 11.025 kHz quarter, 22.05 kHz half, 44.1 kHz full. Encrypted packets have an additional 31 or 24 byte header before the AES -CBC encrypted payload as follows: An FLV player

6045-437: The first version of Adobe Integrated Runtime (later re-branded as Adobe AIR ), a runtime engine that replaced Flash Player, and provided additional capabilities to the ActionScript 3.0 language to build desktop and mobile applications. With AIR, developers could access the file system (the user's files and folders), and connected devices such as a joystick, gamepad, and sensors for the first time. In 2011, Adobe Flash Player 11

6138-582: The help of additional software (such as the Skyfire web browser application.) Apple iOS has never supported Flash. Android versions above 2.1 through 4.0 supported Flash; Adobe has discontinued Flash Player for Android. On 29 June 2012, Adobe announced that, as they were discontinuing development of the mobile version of Flash, they would prevent the Flash player from installing from the Google Play Store on any Android devices that do not already have

6231-521: The interleaving and multiplexing is done at the packet level, with RTMP packets across several different active channels being interleaved in such a way as to ensure that each channel meets its bandwidth, latency, and other quality-of-service requirements. Packets interleaved in this fashion are treated as indivisible, and are not interleaved on the fragment level. The RTMP defines several virtual channels on which packets may be sent and received, and which operate independently of each other. For example, there

6324-487: The message size (measured in bytes), the Timestamp Delta and Message Type . This last value is a single byte and defines whether the packet is an audio, video, command or "low level" RTMP packet such as an RTMP Ping. An example is shown below as captured when a flash client executes the following code: this will generate the following Chunk: The packet starts with a Basic Header of a single byte (0x03) where

6417-401: The message with a stream Id of 3 (which would be the message right above it). The six least significant bits that form the Stream ID can take values between 3 and 63. Some values have special meaning, like 1 that stands for an extended ID format, in which case there will be two bytes following that. A value of two is for low level messages such as Ping and Set Client Bandwidth. The next bytes of

6510-406: The new standard file format F4V (ISO base media file format) because it overcomes functional limits with the FLV structure when streaming H.264 or AAC, which is one reason Adobe Systems is moving away from the older FLV file structure. Since 2002, the initial format is Flash Video and the file suffix is .flv with a MIME derived Internet media type of video/x-flv. The Adobe-branded file suffix .f4v

6603-552: The ninth major version of Flash. It introduced the ActionScript 3.0 programming language, which supported modern programming practices and enabled business applications to be developed with Flash. Adobe Flex Builder (built on Eclipse ) targeted the enterprise application development market, and was also released the same year. Flex Builder included the Flex SDK, a set of components that included charting, advanced UI, and data services ( Flex Data Services ). In 2008, Adobe released

6696-427: The onMetaData callback function. Audio packets have the first byte of the payload defining the decoding details with the first four bits for the encoding used and the last four bits for the parameters required to process the encoding. Video packets have this order reversed. Video encodings enumerated from 0 are: Video processing parameters enumerated from 1 are: MPEG-4 encodings such as H.264, MPEG-4 ASP and AAC add

6789-461: The only valid types used. The third bit indicates the payload is encrypted using the same mechanism as RTMP uses, however this is rarely used due to encrypted transports such as RTMP being used instead. The FLV packet encryption is generally inherited from a MP4 file that is stored on an Adobe Flash Media Server . Following that, there are three bytes for the Payload Size denoting length of

6882-520: The potential for a vector-based web animation tool that might challenge Macromedia Shockwave technology. In 1995, FutureWave modified SmartSketch by adding frame-by-frame animation features and released this new product as FutureSplash Animator on Macintosh and PC. FutureWave approached Adobe Systems with an offer to sell them FutureSplash in 1995, but Adobe turned down the offer at that time. Microsoft wanted to create an "online TV network" ( MSN 2.0 ) and adopted FutureSplash animated content as

6975-598: The primary authoring software for Flash content, to Adobe Animate to reflect its growing use for authoring HTML5 content in favor of Flash content. ActionScript 3.0 was released with this version, along with ActionScript Virtual Machine 2.0 (AVM2) for faster code execution and garbage collection New programming features included: strongly typed variables with type safety, runtime errors, improved events, display list instead of "depth" system, and many new classes (Socket, ByteArray, Loader, RegExp, etc.). AS3 allowed entire applications to be written in code, without needing

7068-478: The protocol, dated 21 December 2012. The web landing page leading to that specification notes that "To benefit customers who want to protect their content, the open RTMP specification does not include Adobe's unique secure RTMP measures". A document accompanying the Adobe specification grants "non-exclusive, royalty-free, nontransferable, non-sublicensable, personal, worldwide" patent license to all implementations of

7161-448: The protocol, with two restrictions: one forbids use for intercepting streaming data ("any technology that intercepts streaming video, audio and/or data content for storage in any device or medium"), and another prohibits circumvention of "technological measures for the protection of audio, video and/or data content, including any of Adobe’s secure RTMP measures". Stefan Richter, author of some books on Flash , noted in 2008 that while Adobe

7254-404: The publishing of application programming interfaces for porting Flash to new devices, and the publishing of The Flash Cast protocol and Action Message Format (AMF), which let Flash applications receive information from remote databases. As of February 2009 , the specifications removing the restrictions on the use of SWF and FLV/F4V specs have been published. The Flash Cast protocol—now known as

7347-523: The remaining six bits of the Basic Header (BH) (least significant) is 0 then the BH is two bytes and represents from Stream ID 64 to 319 (64+255); if the value is 1, then the BH is three bytes (with last two bytes encoded as 16bit Little Endian) and represents from Stream ID 64 to 65599 (64+65535); if the value is 2, then BH is one byte and is reserved for low-level protocol control messages and commands. The Chunk Message Header contains meta-data information such as

7440-491: The same numeric values as the RTMP Chunk Type field (ex. 0x08 for audio and 0x09 for video). FLV tags are thus converted into RTMP packets when the file is streamed through a Flash Media Server or equivalent RTMP Server. The first packet encountered is usually a metadata packet which contains information such as: When streamed using an Actionscript built player, the metadata values above are passed as arguments on

7533-550: The same way as SWF files. The F4V file format is based on the ISO base media file format , starting with Flash Player 9 update 3. Both formats are supported in Adobe Flash Player and developed by Adobe Systems. FLV was originally developed by Macromedia . In the early 2000s, Flash Video was the de facto standard for web-based streaming video (over RTMP ). Users include Hulu , VEVO , Yahoo! Video , metacafe , Reuters.com , and many other news providers. Flash Video FLV files usually contain material encoded with codecs following

7626-513: The second four all being 0, and the rest being random (and which can be set to 0 in third party implementations). C2 and S2 are an echo of S1 and C1 respectively, except with the second four bytes being the time the respective message was received (instead of 0). After C2 and S2 are received, the handshake is considered complete. At this point, the client, and server can negotiate a connection by exchanging AMF encoded messages. These include key value pairs which relate to variables that are needed for

7719-489: The tenth version of Flash, Adobe Flash CS4 . Flash 10 improved animation capabilities within the Flash editor, adding a motion editor panel (similar to Adobe After Effects ), inverse kinematics (bones), basic 3D object animation, object-based animation, and other text and graphics features. Flash Player 10 included an in-built 3D engine (without GPU acceleration) that allowed basic object transformations in 3D space (position, rotation, scaling). Also in 2008, Adobe released

7812-437: The two most significant bits (b 00 000011) define a chunk header type of 0 while the rest (b00 000011 ) define a Chunk Stream ID of 3. The four possible values of the header type and their significance are: The last type (b11) is always used in the case of aggregate messages where, in the example above, the second message will start with an id of 0xC3 (b11000011) and would mean that all Message Header fields should be derived from

7905-509: The use of RTMP in scenarios where the use of non-tunneled RTMP would otherwise not be possible, such as when the client is behind a firewall that blocks non-HTTP and non-HTTPS outbound traffic. The protocol works by sending commands through the POST URL, and AMF messages through the POST body. An example is for a connection to be opened. Adobe has released a specification for version 1.0 of

7998-469: Was SmartSketch, a product published by FutureWave Software in 1993. The company was founded by Charlie Jackson , Jonathan Gay , and Michelle Welsh. SmartSketch was a vector drawing application for pen computers running the PenPoint OS . When PenPoint failed in the marketplace, SmartSketch was ported to Microsoft Windows and Mac OS . As the Internet became more popular, FutureWave realized

8091-611: Was extended from 2007 to support the ISO base media file format using the same MIME derived Internet media type of video/mp4 as the Apple file suffix of .m4v and the general file suffix of .mp4. Adobe-branded file suffixes exist for .f4p which relates to media encrypted with their Adobe Access DRM scheme; .f4a and .f4b relate respectively to .m4a and .m4b with the same MIME derived Internet media type of audio/mp4. SWF files published for Flash Player 6 and later versions are able to exchange audio, video, and data over RTMP connections with

8184-456: Was initially used to create fully-interactive websites, but this approach was phased out with the introduction of HTML5 . Instead, Flash found a niche as the dominant platform for online multimedia content, particularly for browser games . Following an open letter written by Steve Jobs in 2010 stating that he would not approve the use of Flash on Apple 's iOS devices due to numerous security flaws, use of Flash declined as Adobe transitioned to

8277-470: Was recently added for H.264 video content as well. Flash Player 9 Update 3, released on 3 December 2007, also includes support for the new Flash Video file format F4V and H.264 video standard (also known as MPEG-4 part 10, or AVC) which is even more computationally demanding, but offers significantly better quality/bitrate ratio. Specifically, Flash Player now supports video compressed in H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10), audio compressed using AAC (MPEG-4 Part 3),

8370-548: Was released with this version, enabling object-oriented programming but lacking the easier "Script assist" method of writing code. JavaScript for Flash (JSFL) allowed users to write scripts to automate tasks within the Flash editor. New programming features included: web services integration, MP3/FLV media playback components, XML data service components, data binding APIs, the Project Panel, V2 UI components, and Transition libraries. Flash 8 Macromedia Flash Basic 8,

8463-506: Was released, and specifically targeted the application development market. Flex introduced new user interface components, advanced data visualization components, data remoting, and a modern IDE (Flash Builder). Flex competed with Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) and Microsoft Silverlight during its tenure. Flex was upgraded to support integration with remote data sources, using AMF , BlazeDS , Adobe LiveCycle , Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud , and others. Between 2006 and 2016,

8556-402: Was released, and with it the first version of Stage3D , allowing GPU-accelerated 3D rendering for Flash applications and games on desktop platforms such as Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X . Adobe further improved 3D capabilities from 2011 to 2013, adding support for 3D rendering on Android and iOS platforms, alpha-channels, compressed textures, texture atlases , and other features. Adobe AIR

8649-720: Was upgraded to support 64-bit computers, and to allow developers to add additional functionality to the AIR runtime using AIR Native Extensions (ANE). In May 2014, Adobe announced that Adobe AIR was used in over 100,000 unique applications and had over 1 billion installations logged worldwide. Adobe AIR was voted the Best Mobile Application Development product at the Consumer Electronics Show on two consecutive years (CES 2014 and CES 2015). In 2016, Adobe renamed Flash Professional,

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