Right now the final testing & packaging of FW 2.4 PR2 is happening. Before the final 2.4 release there will be some changes on the website as well, so FW 2.4 PR2 will happen in the meanime to not further delay this new update.
Of course, there are still more fixes we’d like to get into the final 2.4 for Android (the other platforms are in much better shape).
The FW 2.4 PR2 release is now expected next week.
The delay in release was mostly caused by string of Flash Plugin issues which culminated in the Flash Plugin crashing when running Alchemy code(we were trying to find workarounds). The second reason of the delays was trying to get to a state where the new FW Android could be released at least as “alpha” instead of “tech demo” it was till now. In the end we had to be satisfied with a state where there are number of issues but at least we understand some of the biggest issues we saw. As a result, we know some workarounds as well.
One example of such obscure issue on Android & AIR: if you initiate webcam and start recording right afterwards, everything will just slowly disintegrate. This is due to the fact that even AIR reports the webcam as initialized, at least on our device it was still initializing, and playing with GLES context in the encoder init seemed to throw the whole GLES off. A simple (pretty ugly) solution for now is always making sure to initialize webcam at least few seconds before allowing any video recording. We expect more “golden gems” like that to popup on Android / AIR unfortunately.
There are ongoing issues with audio, but at least we’ve got the microphone recording working using native code and also both non-realtime mode and capturing individual DisplayObjects is supported (this is new). Which makes this version very close to the iOS version in terms of features – not in terms of stability yet, but we’ll get at least somewhere at 75-80% stability of iOS in the end (not very optimistic I know, but thats the nature of Android). We’ll have to work more on workarounds & detecting issues and gracefully handling them to avoid crashes or freezes. We will be getting into that phase pretty soon(after dealing with addSoundtrack and making addAudioFrame & microphone more stable for the final 2.4 release – which will finish the new Android version feature-wise).
There has been also news about the video recording capability in iOS9 – you can be sure we’ll implement this in FlashyWrappers as soon as possible. Similar API should be present in Android 5.0 and we’ll be looking at that as well. We’ll be always trying to implement the latest of mobile video recording API’s in case it helps with stability / performance. And these might help with both, including native audio recording. Of course those API’s will only capture fullscreen(or maybe screen regions) – luckily FW still supports individual DisplayObject / ByteArray capturing (now also on Android).
Anyway, stay tuned for more news – this past one-two months have been pretty hard in terms of accumulated bugs and delays, but we’re marching on to make FW the most stable & feature rich video recording SDK for Flash & AIR.
Oh, and one last thing. When contacting us, please make sure your inbox is working 🙂 If we are not answering within 2-3 days latest(usually we reply sooner) it is not because we’d like to ignore people, but because we can’t get to you. This is specifically for “CPH” now (but there have been others in the past), there’s no way to send e-mails to you – we’ve tried several e-mail accounts.
We’re looking to add support forums / comments after FW 2.4 is out to make sure there are no issues with e-mails in the future.