Apart from the brand new OS X ANE, also coming up in the 2.4 release will be the new (and improved) Android ANE. The new Android ANE was already introduced in the previous release, taking advantage of Android hardware acceleration for video encoding. But as promised – this new release is going to add audio recording & muxing AAC stream into mp4.
As of now, it is possible to capture fullscreen OpenGL and microphone from AIR, the synchronization appears to be working fine as well – exampleCamera runs reasonably smoothly on our test ASUS tablet, at around 35-40fps while capturing video & audio (vs 60fps when not). There is still room for improvement by adding more multithreading, so the fps should improve in the future. Nevertheless, this release is still in alpha and it is not recommended to use it in production.
Windows mp4 ANE
Whats that with all the new ANE’s? Well, as stated earlier, using FFmpeg and mp4 related codecs(H.264/AAC) presents always licensing issues. Even when using OpenH264 for H.264, the AAC part still needs licensing. The core of the problem is as follows: By embedding an encoder(software encoding raw frames into one of those streams) somebody should pay for licensing those encoders – most likely you – the person releasing end-user software.
That’s why we decided to instead use encoders embedded in the OS (ie. Android, iOS, Windows, OS X). It means more versions of source code, which is not great internally, but unfortunately there’s no other way if we want to support mp4 without you having to deal with licensing.
The new Windows mp4 ANE is going to use MediaFoundation on Windows (instead of FFmpeg / OpenH264 which the current one uses). MediaFoundation includes its own H.264 and AAC encoders which FW will use. This will work only on Windows 7+, but we believe that is reasonable considering Windows 10 being around the corner and W7 being the most favorite Windows around.
In fact, the new Windows ANE is already working in the first tests 😉 We’re just waiting for the dust to settle a bit around the new OS X release coming in 2.4.
Few last words
We’ve been looking at why people want to use FW. Don’t think that the form you fill in when downloading FlashyWrappers SDK is used just for some kind of marketing. It can always give us idea where to steer FW if we see some recurring theme.
We’ve noticed quite many people assume FW can capture videos running in Flash. While that to some extent is true (it can capture the picture frames if the video is inside MovieClip), there’s no way for it to capture audio currently. There might not be a way ever in Flash, and on other platforms only after implementing app-wide audio capture where possible (this is one of the next big goals).
But so far FW is not yet that magical box which just captures everything regardless of what it is – though thats the ideal goal, of course 🙂