Adobe Open Media Source Media Framework: Pros and Cons

Where did the Adobe Strobe project go? It was not even a few months ago that I first found the homepage for this project. The homepage claimed that Adobe came together with a bunch of other companies to create a consortium that aims to take Flash Video Player development out of the equation of competition. The partner company roster was impressive, and the pronouncements were boastful. ‘Lets standardize player development!’ they urged, ‘lets make player development easy so that people can focus on other elements of the value chain’. But what was this really?

In essence it was all a big PR move. The ‘Strobe Project’ as a whole really didn’t amount to much besides a lot of hot air. However, the Open Video Player page did indeed seem substantial. Here is an open source code base of a video player created by none other than the CDN Akamai. The page also features links to sites that have used this video player as a base for their players. I got excited about it and decided to give it a try.

I downloaded the code and tried in in Flash CS4. The features seemed vast: an informative debugging screen and a way to specify a SMIL file source that contains individual links to the same media encoded into different bit-rates to facilitate adaptive streaming. The player touts an extending drawer that shows other media files. The player can read RSS feeds and show appropriately embedded video. However, on actually running the latest player I hit some depressing bugs. The scrubbing is crappy: its inconsistent and glitchy. The autostart setting is definitely busted: setting autostart to off produced very strange and incorrect results. The debug console didn’t seem available – it was grayed out in the contextual menu.

I decided to download a previous version and see how that performed. Though the autostart bug was not there (seems to be a recent bug only with the latest version) the scrubbing was still whack. Its a shame that a player as feature-full and flexible doesn’t have the basic necessities ironed out. I decided to check out the example sites mentioned on the page. I was surprised and disappointed to find that the players on these sites were similarly buggy, if not more so. Some of the sites didn’t load at all.

Now it looks like the Strobe Project is gone from the internet, replaced with Adobe’s Open Source Media Framework. This looks like a more serious and sober project site with less PR and more meat. Downloading the source though showed that it still relives on the open video player. Perhaps the video player included here is less buggy? The open video player source forge page doesn’t show any updates since May of 2009, so I doubt it.

In conclusion, Adobe and Akamai should test their code before releasing it to the greater public. However, I still think its cool of them to release it. I hope to find the time to fix their bugs and contribute my fixes back into the community.