Streaming videos to iOS devices from Flash Media Server 4.5

A quick example as we’ve finally get Flash Media Server 4.5 installed and running. One of the new tricks that FMS can do is stream to iOS (it’s about time, right!). To prove that, if you have an iOS device then go ahead and click here (if the link doesn’t work it’s just that the domain hasn’t propagated to your area just yet, wait a bit and come back) to see one of the sample files play. Quick disclaimer, I may take this example down at anytime. If you’re really keen to check it out then let me know and I can possibly send a link in an email. I’m sure Adobe will have lots of examples up soon though.

With this newest feature you can finally serve up all your files with one piece of software (sorta, FMS uses Apache by default to do this). This is just the VOD packager working, in another example I’ll show live footage.

Anyways, there’s nothing to do once you get FMS installed with Apache (it’s all bundled together). It just works out of the box. That’s handy. From here there are a lots of things to do for customization, but at least it’s a great proof of concept. If you have more than one piece of software trying to use port 80 then you’ll need to bind FMS to one IP address and the other software to another IP address (like IIS on a windows machine), but that’s simple to do. Just make a quick change to the fms.ini file in the conf directory to point to a specific IP address in the adaptor.hostport. Restart FMS and you should be good to go and there won’t be port conflicts on startup. There’s nothing to do for Apache, it runs on a completely different port and FMS just proxies requests over to it.

That’s it, that’s all. Simple.