Acoustic Echo Cancelation working

Acoustic Echo Cancellation is part of Flash Player 10.3.
Users are able to enjoy live audio/video communication without the risk of acoustic feedback. Previous post on Flash vs. AEC.

It's a bit tricky to implement yet.

First get the latest Flash Player Content Debugger 10.3.181.22, not the incubator version.

With the current Build of the Flex SDK (4.5.0.20967) that's also shipped with Flash Builder 4.5, you need to add this playerglobal.swc to the SDK's /frameworks/libs/player/10.3/ directory.

Add additional mxmlc compiler arguments with your IDE or directly to the actionscript properties file.
// Specifies the version of Flash Player that you want to target with the application, targets the correct playerglobal.swc.
-target-version=10.3

// Specifies the SWF file format version of the output SWF file.
-swf-version=12

Then use this code snippet in your ActionScript Class.
...
// Gets reference to the Microphone instance with enhanced options.
var microphone:Microphone = Microphone.getEnhancedMicrophone(deviceIndex);
microphone.codec = SoundCodec.SPEEX;
var enhancedOptions = new MicrophoneEnhancedOptions();

// Sets AEC mode for users without a headset.
enhancedOptions.mode = MicrophoneEnhancedMode.FULL_DUPLEX;
microphone.enhancedOptions = enhancedOptions;
...

Have fun!

Example ChatRoom using Red5 Media Server running on an Amazon EC2 instance and Adobe Cirrus rendezvous service. It's based on the direct RTMFP peer-to-peer connection feature of Adobe Flash Player 10

Acoustic Echo Cancellation support for Flash Player

If you ever developed a Flash application with live audio/video communication you probably ran into trouble with acoustic echo/feedback.
The flash.media.useEchoSuppression property doesn't solve the problem Flash Player had no AEC support.
Maybe you tried some workarounds but faced the requirement that the user had to use a headset for a good experience.

Please read my latest post about the current implementation of the AEC feature.

Fortunately AEC support will be part of a Flash Player version in 2011.
MicrophoneEnhancedOptions and MicrophoneEnhancedMode are not included in the current beta version of the Flash Player (10.2) but according to this Jira ticket from the Adobe Flash Player Bug and Issue Management System this feature is developed and will be part of an upcoming player version in 2011.

The code, when both speaker and microphone are used simultaneously, might look like this:

...
import flash.media.Microphone;
import flash.media.MicrophoneEnhancedMode;
import flash.media.MicrophoneEnhancedOptions;
import flash.media.SoundCodec;
...
var microphone:Microphone = Microphone.getEnhancedMicrophone(deviceIndex);
microphone.codec = SoundCodec.SPEEX;
var enhancedOptions = new MicrophoneEnhancedOptions();
enhancedOptions.mode = MicrophoneEnhancedMode.FULL_DUPLEX;
microphone.enhancedOptions = enhancedOptions;
...

Example chat room using Red5 and Adobe Cirrus aka Stratus rendezvous service, i created for a small ActionScript 3 VideoChatAPI in February 2009.
I developed it for a collaboration software of Dorian. It's using the direct RTMFP peer to peer connection feature of Flash Player 10, the 10.1 multicast feature is not suitable in this case.

MXML without Flex

Yesterday while working in Paris a co-worker seamed to be a bit surprised that it's possible to use MXML whithout extensive dependencies on the Adobe Flex Framework. So I made a tiny example app. Of course it's smaller than 20kb.

Surprisingly most people are more interested in using the component framework without MXML than the oposite. Maybe they haven't mentioned the advantages of declarative language features in the right development environment for tasks like composition, skinning and configuration. Don't get me wrong - most of the things I'm developing are programmed in Actionscript!

In this case the [DefaultProperty] and [ArrayElementType] Metatags are essential. Just have a look!

source

The next step is to focus a bit more on the Databinding feature.

source

In a real world application no one would use a code block inside of his MXML file by choice. Instead of this e.g. a Presentation Model or Presenter Pattern can be applied.

If you use the additional compiler argument -keep you will mention that several classes of the mx.core.* and mx.bindings.* package are imported in the generated code. but hey! do we really care about this hand full of kb?

AMF3 remote procedure call and class mapping without Flex / mx.rpc package

If you want to avoid dependencies to the mx.rpc package and got problems with AMF3 remote procedure calls and class mapping here's a small example.

example application, source

AMFPHP

Styling text within Flash TextField using ActionScript3 & external CSS file

I've made an example for styling text in an ActionScript3 project without using any Flex classes.
I embedded font, css & xml-files - feel free to load these at runtime.

source

Embed your fonts, styles & data

[Embed(source="/assets/font/Verdana.ttf", fontFamily="embeddedFont", mimeType="application/x-font-truetype")]
private static const embeddedFont:Class;
[Embed(source="/assets/font/Verdana Bold.ttf", fontFamily="embeddedFontBold", fontWeight="bold", mimeType="application/x-font-truetype")]
private static const embeddedFontBold:Class; 
[Embed(source="/assets/css/textFieldStyles.css", mimeType="application/octet-stream")]
public static const styleSheet:Class;
[Embed(source="/assets/xml/data.xml", mimeType="application/octet-stream")]
public static const xmlData:Class;

Register fonts

public function Application() {
    Font.registerFont(embeddedFont);
    Font.registerFont(embeddedFontBold);
    createTextField();
}

Create TextField, assign StyleSheet and data

private function createTextField():void {
    var textField:TextField = new TextField();
    addChild(textField);
    
    textField.width = 500;
    textField.multiline = true;
    textField.wordWrap = true;
    textField.autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.LEFT;
    textField.embedFonts = true;
    textField.antiAliasType = AntiAliasType.ADVANCED;
    
    textField.styleSheet = 
        StyleSheetUtil.forClassDefinition(styleSheet);
    textField.htmlText = new XML(new xmlData());
}

Styling text within Flex 3 TextArea using external CSS file

If you ever wondered how to use external style-sheets within a Flex 3 TextArea control to format text here's a nice solution.

example application
source

Embed your textfield styles in flex-applications css file

Application {
    fontFamily: embeddedFont;
    styleSheet: Embed(source="textFieldStyles.css", mimeType="application/octet-stream");
}

Create StyleSheet from style-definition and assign it and your data to the TextArea instance

private function applicationComplete():void {
    textArea.styleSheet = 
        StyleSheetUtil.forClassDefinition(getStyle("styleSheet"));
    textArea.htmlText = data;
}