I am making a website using adobe flash and action script. but I heard a lot about flash vulnerabilities.
Is it secure to make a website using adobe flash, comparably to ordinary tools like wordpress and joomla?
In theory Flash is secure, but I would recommend not using it.
The reasons Flash has many vulnerabilities is not because of the websites using it, but the clients not updating their Flash clients. Your site depends on the client for security which is almost always a bad idea.
There also is a second reason not to use Flash and that is compatibility. Flash won't work on iPhones, Android Phones, Windows Phones and it won't take long before all browsers will block it (Firefox already does that!).
And the third argument is that it just is not necessary to use Flash anymore. You can use HTML, CSS3 and maybe a bit of JavaScript to be able to do anything Flash once was unique in.
Flash make your page to load very slow.
If site is created only in flash? not only a part of it(like header logo and other) the user will wait while all flash will load and this take times and very expensive traffic if is used mobile device to connect PC to internet (usb 4G modem, or mobile built in modem ).
I'm building a flex mobile application that streams the device's live video to flash media server.I can't run such an application on the flash buider's emulator because it doesn't emulate the camera and i don't have an android device to test my work on it.I wonder if using the NetConnection and NetStream classes with the device's camera will work as in a regular flex web application.I really need an advice from someone who tested those two classes(NetConnection and NetStream) with flex mobile.Any pointers or advices will be appreciated.
Thanks in Advance.
NetConnection and NetStream with Adobe AIR for Mobiles works exactly as how it works with a regular web application.
However, some things have to be considered. Your mobile application should be developed on a "Landscape" mode. Since there is a bug with adobe such that the video stream gets rotated when you are sending the video stream from your front camera.
Bug Report
However, i am not recommending you to stop developing the application. This will be a good challenge though.
I'm writing a flex 4.5 application that's supposed to capture a video from a webcam and audio from microphone and save it in some video format (i don't care which format).
I use VideoDisplay to display the webcam. how can I fetch and play audio in real time ?
Is there a way to save the video locally without using a flash media server?
Flash/Flex does not have video encoding capabilities. You will need to send to a server for the encoding.
Sorry, I know this isn't good news. :\
You can check with the red5Recorder which is a player built using flex builder and configurable to any recorder like Red5 server or Flash FMS. You can check with the open source code to understand that.
I want to attach scanner to a flex application and read the image using scanner.Does anyone know how to attach scanner to a flex application?.
if you're building an AIR application with a native installer, you can incorporate a serial proxy (here's a list) and use the new File and NativeProcess APIs to (probably) communicate with a scanner.
Mike Chambers details how to accomplish serial communication with an Arduino on his blog.
This is impossible. Flash Player only permits access to camera and microphone.
See: Your privacy and Adobe Flash Player
A quick glance at the present-day internet would seem to indicate that Adobe Flash is the obvious choice for embedding video in a web page. Is this accurate, or are they other effective choices? Does the choice of ASP.NET as a platform influence this decision?
Flash is certainly the most ubiquitous and portable solution. 98% of browsers have Flash installed. Other alternatives are Quicktime, Windows Media Player, or even Silverlight (Microsoft's Flash competitor, which can be used to embed several video formats).
I would recommend using Flash (and it's FLV video file format) for embedding your video unless you have very specific requirements as far as video quality or DRM.
Flash is usually the product of choice: Everyone has it, and using the JW FLV Player makes it relatively easy on your side.
As for other Video Formats, there are WMV and QuickTime, but the players are rather "heavy", not everyone might have them and they feel so 1990ish...
Real Player... Don't let me even start ranting about that pile of ...
The only other alternative of Flash that I would personally consider is Silverlight, which allows streaming WMV Videos. I found the production of WMV much better and easier than FLV because all Windows FLV Encoders I tried are not really good and stable, whereas pretty much every tool can natively output WMV. The problem with Silverlight is that no one has that Browser Plugin (yet?). There is also a player from JW.
One consideration would be whether video playback is via progressive download or streaming. If it's progressive download, then I would say use Flash because you get a wider audience reach.
For streaming wmv, it is out of the box functionality provided by Windows Media Services
For streaming flash, you will have to install a streaming server on your Windows box. Some options are:
Adobe Flash Media Server (Commercial)
Wowza Media Server (Free/Commercial)
Red5 Flash Server (Open Source)
If you have access to Microsoft Expression Encoder 2, you can use that to encode a video file and generate a Silverlight video player. Then if you have IIS 7, you can use Adaptive or Smooth Streaming also checkout Smooth HD for a really cool example.
You can also do streaming from the free Microsoft Silverlight Streaming Service. It's connected to a Windows Live account.
A consideration is that the client will need to have Silverlight installed, just like Flash, but Flash has been around longer.
<object width="660" height="525"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/WAQUskZuXhQ&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x006699&color2=0x54abd6&border=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/WAQUskZuXhQ&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x006699&color2=0x54abd6&border=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="660" height="525"></embed></object>
I have worked for a company that developed a system for distributing media content to dedicated "players". It was web based and used ASP.NET technology and have tried almost every possible media format you can think of and your choice really comes down to asking yourself:
does it needs to play directly out of the box, or can I make sure that the components required to play the videos can be installed beforehand?
If your answer is that it needs to play out of the box then really your only option is flash (I know that it is not installed by default, but most will already have it installed)
If it is not a big issue that extra components are needed then you can go with formats that are supported by windows media player
The reason why windows media player falls into the second option is because for some browsers and some formats extra components must be installed.
We had the luxury that the "players" were provided by us, so we could go for the second option, however even we tried to convert as much as possible back to flash because it handles way better than windows media player
"Does the choice of ASP.NET as a platform influence this decision?"
Probably not.