Secondly, I have been trying to find out how independent developers such as myself can make use of Flash in Media Center. A friend of a friend managed to get this unofficial response;

As far as I know, the Platform/APIs are only available for internal use. We don’t have any plan to release public documentation on that at this moment.

So that means that until Microsoft change their minds or someone manages to dissect the delivered code to work out how to use the libraries in an unsupported way, we are stuck without Flash support for independent developer.

1) Here in the UK, the Internet TV Beta 2 link has disappeared from our menus. I suspect that is because it was really buggy (I often got errors that my video library was unavailable). Hopefully it just means that a new better version is on the way

2) An advert for Sky Player has appeared in the menus;

At the moment it is just a link to http://www.microsoft.com/uk/windows/skyplayer/, but hopefully it should be live soon. Unfortunately it looks to be a complete rip off. According to Sky, you can watch the following channels live for £15 a month:

• G.O.L.D.
• Sky Real Lives
• Sky Arts 1
• MTV ONE
• Sky Sports News
• British Eurosport
• ESPN Classic
• Sky News
• National Geographic
• Nat Geo Wild
• History
• Eden
• Cartoon Network
• Boomerang
• Nickelodeon
• Disney Channel
• Nick Jr

I struggle to see a single one of those I would want to watch even if it were free, and certainly wouldn’t pay £15 a month for it.

This is also available on the Xbox 360 without a PC, but for that on top of the £15, you need an Xbox Live Gold Membership (£3/month). When you compare it to the lower cost of £17.50 a month for hundreds of channels and free broadband with a regular sky box, that doesn’t seem like a bargain.

More interestingly you can add Sky Sports 1, 2, 3 and Xtra for £34 (+£3 XBOX Live) a month, but again that doesn’t compare well with the £35.50 you would pay for it on a regular sky box along with all of the other channels and again broadband.

So, perhaps Sky are more interested in the catch-up TV market. That certainly offers slightly more, with Sky One programs available for £1.47 a time, and Sky Box Office movies available for £3.43 a time. But when compared with bittorrent for free TV programs and the likes of Love Film at £1.99 for a blu-ray movie, I just don’t see it working.

3) The big shocker for me was this post from Stuart at  The Digital Lifestyle announcing that Flash is now in use in Media Center. This is a major shocker for me because Sky are using silverlight to integrate in to the Windows architecture, and I had assumed that Microsoft were too blinkered to acknowledge that Flash is the market leader, however it seems that they have been very pragmatic here and allowed the use of Flash in media center. Unfortunately there are no details on how anyone other than Netflix can use it yet, but I am sure that will emerge over time. The bad news is that it won’t work on extenders, but it is a step in the right direction for the rest of us.

Most of the TV companies who provide flash video do so using the Akamai tech stack to secure and stream their content. They build their own custom flash players on top of that to provide their own flavour to the players, e.g. related videos and so on. The probably intentional side effect of this is that it is really not trivial to get in to their flash streams and do anything with it. It’s not like the have an rtmp url easily accessible for you to get hold of. There are ways of doing it, but not easily. There is for example a project on sourceforge called rtmpdump (http://sourceforge.net/projects/rtmpdump/) which allows you to download flash videos from the BBC and from Hulu.One of the biggest problems with the TV companies building their own flash players is that they typically don’t build them to interact with the remote control – i.e. they don’t listen for key presses, or have useful javascript hooks to send messages to the player. I have at times overcome that in the past by building custom versions of the flash players. That’s time consuming and annoying.

Another annoyance with flash is that it is not supported in MCML – the vista and windows 7 presentation layer for writing media center applications. That means that any application like this has to exit MCML and enter html to play flash content. That’s not that hard to build, but it does have the additional pain that you can’t use the MCMLPad debugger with the code any more, because it’s not compatible with the Add-In required to go to html. Doesn’t effect the end user, but is a pain for the developer.

A further annoyance is Flash’s full screen behaviour. For some security reason, they don’t allow any mouse or keyboard input to be received by the flash player when in full screen, except the escape key. Probably to avoid someone creating a fake version of your PC and tricking you in to doing things, but its much more of a pain than a benefit in my opinion. That means that to pick up remote event, you need to exit full screen. You could just have a large flash window to work round that, but flash add some hardware acceleration in full screen mode that you miss out on with just a large flash player.

The really big problem with flash though is extenders. The way that extenders work is that they have one dedicated channel for music and video, and everything else is sent via a remote desktop connection. Microsoft have a great article on it here;

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb852206.aspx

To summarize it though, you will get WMV, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, WMA, MP3 and WAV-PCM to play fine on an extender, and everything else is routed over the remote desktop protocol, which has quite a few limitations. Most notable of those limitations is that the frame rate is poor, and in some cases no sound (I have never worked out why no sound – if anyone knows the explanation, I would love to know). Microsoft’s advice is not to use flash on extenders. It’s a shame they didn’t make a flash engine part of the technology requirements on the extender, but it’s too late for that now.

As part of the windows 7 beta testing, I grilled Microsoft on support for flash in the MCML layer and on extenders. Unfortunately the answer is that they don’t see it as a priority at this time. I think that is very short sighted given the direction that online video is going. Over the past year, I have noticed more TV providers move away from WMV to flash, because it is cross-platform compatible. That gets the Mac and Linux lobbyists off their backs. I also suspect that the DRM on WMV being cracked didn’t endear that format to them either.

So, since the future of online video for the moment lies with flash, and Microsoft aren’t interested in providing better support for that in media center and extenders, the only real way of getting great support for online video in media center is for someone to write a transcoder for converting the flash stream to WMV or MPEG-1/2. Since the flash streams typically contain H.264 video for high def, simply unpacking it from the rtmp stream isn’t enough for it to play on extenders or pre-windows 7 media centers, since they don’t support that video format. That conversion is not a trivial thing to do on the fly (as opposed to downloading the whole thing first then converting it).

I am hoping that this mini-essay on the topic is going to prompt someone out there to start an open source project to convert flash streams to a media center compatible format. There are lots of add-ins that would benefit from it, like my TunerFreeMCE code, Yougle and I’d imagine SecondRun.tv when it gets release, so go on someone, make a name for yourself by taking up this challenge.