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It seems Adobe finally realized that there's a significant Debian user base for their Flash Media Server and started to build "unofficial" Debian support in FMS (the "unofficial" means that the FMS scripts -install, startup, shutdown- still skip a few steps in case FMS runs on Debian). The installation is pretty much straightforward, no problems at all. It even checks for the availability of the libnspr4 library (and stops if does not find it) and creates the fms user and group for you (however I still suggest to create these manually since you want to have these in the system UID/GID range) and sets up automatic start on boot. The libnspr4 lib can be installed via apt-get install libnspr4-0d, the fms user and group can be created via addgroup --system fms; adduser --system --group fms and for the autostart to work right, you'll have to adjust the start/stop runlevels in /etc/init.d/fms after the installation finished and reset the runlevels of the fms script via update-rc.d fms remove; update-rc.d fms defaults (by default the /etc/init.d/fms script does not include runlevel 2 in the start runlevels and Debian's default runlevel is 2).

Adobe's Flash Player can eat up quite some CPU power and sometimes the sole reason for the Flash plugin's high CPU usage is badly written embed code. Eg. the wmode=transparent embed parameter is only required if the Flash contains (and uses) transparent sections and it is necessary for correct rendering to utilize transparency. The other performance killer is the quality embed parameter: setting it to best is most of the time an overkill and totally unnecessary. Unfortunately some Flash developers (and website maintainers) lack the knowledge/time/desire to tune their embed code for optimal performance and use these parameters even if they are not needed. Flash Performance Optimizer tries to fix these problems to give you a better user experience.

It's a well known fact that the the built-in hardware acceleration of Flash Player does not play well with "older" hardware. Mac OS X supports hardware acceleration only on quite recent GPUs and eg. mine is not one of those (my MacBook Pro is from 2006 December). AFAIK Chrome solves this by detecting older GPUs and "manually" disabling hardware acceleration in Flash Player (despite of what you might see in the Flash Player settings manager's "enable hardware acceleration" checkbox). Firefox does no such thing and this results (at least in my case) in slow/lagging video playback.

There's a "well known" bug in all recent Flash Player versions on the linux platform published in the last couple of years. It makes it impossible to display text with the proper fonts in certain languages using an out-of-the-box linux + Flash Player installation. In the linked bugreport people already figured out the solution: one has to specify a font with the required language coverage in the fontconfig configuration.

There are a couple of gotchas with this setup. Eg. I wanted to install on a Debian 4.x server and the installer reported that the platform is not supported.

iShowU is a screen recording application, ie. it allows you to record videos of your screen (or a part of it) into all kinds of video formats (anything that your Quicktime supports). I've googled a little bit in the topic and this app seems to be one of the more capable and sophisticated ones on the market. What might be interesting to fellow gamers is that you can record screen of almost all kinds of games (eg. World of Warcraft, as demonstrated here). Check out this link for a short tutorial on how to set up iShowU (what settings to fine tune) if you want to put the result on the web via streaming.

We're developing a video-conference app at my company and I wanted to test it at home with the MacBook Pro's built-in iSight. However it did not work. It turned out that the new iSights are in fact USB cams and you've to right click any flash movie and select "USB Video Class Video" as your active camera.

There are a couple of gotchas with this setup. Eg. I wanted to install it on an Opteron and the installer reported that the platform is not supported.

In embedded videos (or Flash apps in general) you can specify the width and height in the "WIDTH" and "HEIGHT" parameters of the <OBJECT> tag. But do not forget the space occupied by the controls (button bar, etc.)!
Eg. in case of a Google video the player consists of a video pane and a control bar. The latter takes a fixed 27 pixels in height. So if your video is 160 x 120 and you want to embed it by scaling to double size (without distortion of course), then you have to specify a width of 160*2=320 pixels and a height of 120*2+27=367 pixels.

In my previous post I went into details about flashvars used by embedded Google videos. Originally I wanted to get that list so I can set the initial scaling mode of a video using a flashvars parameter. Unfortunately this is not possible. Here's why ...