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Welcome OSMF 1.0!

Posted: 28/05/10

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Today the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) grew up, as it finally reached its 1.0 release! Whilst the framework API has largely been stable since 0.93 (Sprint 10), the development team have been working tirelessly behind the scenes fixing bugs and improving the depth and coverage of the example applications that ship in the download archive. With the 1.0 launch came an announcement that both the official FIFA World Cup site and ESPN Player are using OSMF as the boilerplate code for their video players.

For me, OSMF is all about standardising the development, maintenance and extension of video players built in Flash. At the heart of this is the powerful plug-in architecture, which will take a lot of the pain out of third-party integration that becomes inevitable in large-scale solutions. I have some plug-in examples here on my blog, and expect there to be many more examples popping up on other blogs over the coming weeks. I also anticipate a flood of advertising networks and CDNs releasing their plug-ins into the market. If you're unfamiliar with OSMF now is a perfect time to get stuck in!

For those that don't class themselves as code monkeys, the Strobe Media Playback public pre-release has been launched. Strobe Media Playback is a ready-to-go player that comes as a SWF that you embed on your website, and pass it URLs of videos to play. It has a predefined user interface, and is capable of handling both streamed and progressive video files - including files delivered through the new HTTP streaming mechanism!

In just under a year, Brian and the team have gone through 11 releases of the framework code to finally reach the framework you see today. Alongside this they have shown incredible support for the community that Greg Hamer and I have tried to build, and I think this is demonstrated in the 300 members of the online OSMF User Group.

Enjoy playing with OSMF 1.0 and hope to see you at the User Group Connect sessions!

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Keywords for this post: osmf, open source, adobe, media, framework, video, stream, progressive, audio, image, actionscript 3, flash, flex