nokia e66 video maximum swf size

[gellm]

How to get large flash video files working on the nokia e66

If anyone out there is ever trying to play serious quantities of flash video (more than a minute per video file) as a standalone application on a nokia e66, here's one way. Details may be useful for other phone models (devices)too.


I know for sure the flv files will play on the phone - realplayer could show them. But trying to play video from external flv files through a netstream, the e66 would only display black video with no sound, although the application continued working as though it were showing me video properly - it didn't crash and my actionscripted controls kept working, I could even blindly skip ahead through my playlist to non video content.

Bizzare. I hope it's just something im doing wrong, rather than the (expensive) phone not being able to do what it should, as a flash lite 3 capable device.

Using device video (eg 3gp) was not very useful for my purposes as i am yet to hear of a way to detect (without netstream) video events like duration which you sort of need to know if you want to play another video immediately after the current one, and not muck around with hand made arrays telling you the duration while you watch a timer. Didnt try that but thought of it.

So I resorted to embedding my video files within the swf, eg on the timeline. This made the swf file very big, maybe 50mb, and although it played fine on my mac g5, it would not open on the phone which said it did not have enough memory.

SOLUTION
From my application's main swf file, I loaded other swf files, each containing an (flv) video embedded on the timeline. Thus each swf would have a small enough file size to work on the phone.

Through trial and error I found the nokia e66 will not open a swf file if its size exceeds 10mb. Under 10mb seems fine, although on the borderline it would tend to open sometimes and fail others. So keep em under 10 and it should all work.

My flvs were encoded with the following (nice) settings in quicktime pro:
2000kbps
15 frames per second framerate
Automatic keyframe placement
Alpha yes
128 kbps mp3 audio mono
320x240 resolution
With these settings my video clips ended up needing to be less than 1 minute 35 seconds in duration to fit in a swf under 10mb.

I wonder if the 10mb rule applies on other devices as well. It would be nice to find documentation telling us this sort of thing. The phone had heaps of memory - 8gb card, and certainly more than 10mb of RAM. It must be a limitation determined by software, maybe in flash player.

I had the latest e66 firmware (january 2009)

Good luck with your video.

One last whinge - why does ultra high quality flash video (2000kbps) play fine with flash player 9 and 10, and on the phone, but look terrible in Adobe Device Central? Ah well. At least it looks nice on the device. Thats whats important.

[gellm]

More on developing video for the nokia e66. (developing on OS X 10.5.6)

To get flv video streaming working, through a wireless LAN. Here is what you will need: (or one way, at least)

A wireless device. I used Airport Extreme, connecting through a password protected access point. You need a pre-shared key for this, which you enter into the AirPort Utility, and also on the phone: Connectivity:WLAN wiz:Edit Access Point:WLAN security settings:
Use the option WPA/WPA2 pre-shared key. (it can be a short one or a long one of 64 hexadecimal characters. This is a better password obviously.) If You pick a 64 character hex key.... make sure you write it down somewhere safe.

WPA2 only is for more hardcore security which requires public/private keys and Certificate Authorities (like Verisign) ...digest authentication and stuff like that. If you're not pushing money or secret information around online, "WPA2 only" is maybe a bit of overkill.

Now with the wireless router on and the phone on you should be able to connect to the access point and view web pages on your phone. Its a good idea to define bookmarks for the url to your flash content, unless you are a very quick texter.

As far as i know, flash and flv streaming cannot be done with rtsp or rtp. You need rtmp.

To stream the video to the phone, you will need to have a server capable of serving rtmp. This is a protocol that Adobe came up with, and thus they use it in their Flash Media Server. It is also supported by Wowza Media Server, which is a great product thus far as I have seen, and is free if you are serving less than 10 connections! Didn't look at FMS but i imagine its as good.

Red5 is an opensource project which also apparently serves rtmp but i couldn't figure out how to use it. I recommend Wowza, because it was easy to set up.

So you install wowza and set it up to serve the flv files. Definitely read the documentation, but here is the gist of it:

Say you want to call your project "myAwsomeStreamingProj"

(Install wowza and) go to WowzaMediaServerPro-1.6.0 (or whatever version you have) and look in the applications folder. Create a folder called "myAwsomeStreamingProj"

Now go to the "content" folder nearby. When I got wowza, it came with an flv already in there called "Extremists.flv". In this folder, add another folder also called "myAwsomeStreamingProj" Put all your flv files to serve in there.

Now go to the wowza folder called "conf". In there is a file called "Application.xml"

This is the base config file for wowza served applications. Copy it.

Create a new folder inside "conf" and call the new folder "myAwsomeStreamingProj"

In it paste your copy of "Application.xml" DONT RENAME IT.

Open your newly pasted xml file and find where it says:

"<AllowDomains>"

Within this tag, list the IP addresses you want to allow while you are developing your application. List them with commas between them, and no spaces. Not sure if this is important but try what you like.

The tag for <AutoAccept> should be true.

Not sure if i have forgotten anything crucial, but if so, I apologise - you will need to read the (excellent) wowza documentation.

To try it out now, find the "Wowza Pro Startup.app" thing. Run it. A terminal window opens. If this is the first time you have run it, you will need to enter the serial number for wowza. DONT GIVE UP IN DESPAIR NOW! - YOU ARE SO VERY CLOSE.

To get the serial number you have to go to the wowza website and fill out their form. This was not immediately apparent to me, at least. [TO DO - GIVE THEM THE URL TO THE FORM]

They email the serial number to you and you type it into the terminal, which is still open and waiting for you.

Now wowza will run. (Unless i forgot to tell you something.)


Now for the actionscript part.

In flash, set up a normal netstream as you would if serving flv content from a local directory via a progressive download. Your netconnection should be connecting to something like "rtmp://someIPaddress:1935/myAwsomeStreamingProj"
rather than null. Here 1935 is default port for streaming via rtmp but wowza will probably still work if you omit the :1935 part. Unless you are doing something tricky like not just plain old flv streaming... i guess.

This will point you to the folder you created in wowza's "content" folder.

Your netstreams url's should target something like "myAwsomeStreamingProj/somevideo.flv"

if that don't work, try adding/removing the "myAwsomeStreamingProj/" prefix.

And you can now bask in the disappointment of the poor video playback on the mobile device. Setting the flash player option for HIGH quality does seem to help a bit. I had to resort to low quality flv encoding, with data rates down in the range of 150 kbps. You may need to set the buffer time of your netstream. I had mine set to about 5 seconds.

Actually the video quality was good, im just picky.

Sorry I have not provided more complete/accurate information. Busy deadline driven people will understand.