I’m working on a particularly exciting initiative for the Connect Pro team at the moment.
Right now when it comes to audio/video integration Connect Pro is kind of land locked in many respects. We take advantage of some cool native capabilities of the Flash Platform, a streaming protocol, RTMP and an audio codec NellyMoser to provide the built in VoIP and streaming capabilities, unfortunately these capabilities are not broadly supported outside of the Flash Platform ecosystem.
There is nothing wrong with RTMP or NellyMoser, in fact both capabilities have helped the Flash Platform become what it is today, a ubiquitous rich client platform. However the audio / video communication industry has begun to converge around a set of standards which are generally referred to under the umbrella of a single standard, SIP. The reality is a little more complex and convoluted but not the subject of my blog post.
So for Connect to collaborate in this ecosystem of interoperable audio / video communication software platforms and devices we needed to bridge the Flash specific protocol of RTMP with SIP (one of two common presence specifications) and RTP (a common streaming protocol for VoIP) and enable transcoding between NellyMoser and G711 (the most widely adopted audio codec for VoIP).
The exciting news is that’s what we’ve done, we’ve built a gateway between Flash Media Server and the VoIP world that bridges protocols and transcodes audio. Further more we’ve integrated that with Connect Pro so you can communicate using Connect Pro and SIP based audio platforms.
Last week we launched these technologies in an early beta, specifically we have two beta’s available to participate in
1. A beta of the gateway to Flash Media Server, you can use this with SIP audio platforms to integrate between Flash based applications and the SIP infrastructure. This includes a process, API and documentation. You’ll need a licensed or developer version of Flash Media Server, a Flash development environment and some Flash and SIP skills
2. A beta of the integration into Connect Pro on Adobe’s hosted platform. You’ll need a Connect Pro Hosted account and you’ll be able to make US toll free calls from Connect Pro meetings.
If you are interested in participating please drop me a note, my email address is mblair at adobe dot com