FlexibleFactory

Some of our readers might have noticed a slightly downbeat tone to our recent posts, especially concerning everyone’s favourite web player! Here’s a more positive post to put the record straight.

Things have been a little quiet here at FlexibleFactory over the last year or so because the team have been busy with the launch of our new website over at TunaMedia Ltd.

Although we’ve kept the Flash content fairly discreet, it really deserves pride of place on the site. Without the Flash Player, this project would not have been possible. Even though we’ve been through a bumpy ride together, now that everything on the site is (quite literally) singing in harmony it gives me great pleasure to introduce you to radiotuna.com. Search thousands of free online radio stations by artist or genre… we’re pretty sure you’ll like it!

…and, despite the bumps and bruises, we still love you, Flash!

Over at tunamedia.co.uk, we’ve released a demo of Flash movie playing Shoutcast streams using the new Sound API features available in Flash Player 10. Take a look.

Over the weekend I was taking a look into whether Silverlight might be a better bet than the Flash player for delivering streaming audio (Shoutcast in particular) to end-users. I built an extremely simple application that points a MediaElement at a Shoutcast stream (using the same url tweaking trick oulined in this previous post) and plays it back. Once again, looking through the documentation, it becomes apparent that Microsoft are trying to steer developers towards the use of their own streaming server solution.

So bearing this in mind, is Silverlight a viable browser solution for delivering legacy streams that fall out of the bracket of their own “streaming solution”? It can play back Shoutcast streams across domains in just the same way that Flash can but suffers the same fundamental problem suffered by Flash. There is no means of informing the player that an mp3 stream delivered over http is not intended for download, so the player keeps the whole stream in memory with the expectation that the download will end at some point… with Shoutcast it never does and the player consumes memory (ultimately ALL of the memory, if left playing long enough). So, both Flash AND Silverlight end up in the same basket on this front, slowly consuming all system memory. I think that this is stupidly limiting, and an API extension to drop played data would be a pretty simple enhancement. At the cost of promoting and protecting their own server products, both Adobe and Microsoft are missing a very fat slice of consumer ears.