P2P Multicast in new Flash Player 10.1

October 7th, 2009

As all of you probably registered - Adobe has announced new Flash Player 10.1 at Adobe MAX L.A. with tons of new features including new RTMFP possibilities.

Currently in Flash Player 10, we had RTMFP support for end-to-end P2P connections only, which is enough for 2 peer communication, but when you want to establish more complex connections (3 or more peers) - it just gets too complicated.

Flash Player 10.1 announced few important additions to the RTMFP protocol:

Groups and Multicast
Groups rapidly simplify the process of connecting peers together. You just define which group you want to join and don’t have to maintain particular connections between other peers. This is making your code so clean by using classes GroupSpecifier (define group), NetGroup (management and statistics) + new features in NetStream (multicast streaming). With end-to-end connections in FP 10.0 before you had to connect to each peer separately, which was quite difficult mechanism to maintain more than 2 peer communication. Now it’s so easy.

What’s more - security - you can control access to a group, which makes it really powerful - especially with defining your own architecture. Also every client can join few different groups at the same time.

Adobe Stratus - rendezvous service for P2P - is also behaving the same way as peer client, so we can predict that in the future FMS, you will be able to send video streams from non-P2P clients to P2P multicast group and connect two different worlds - clients on unicast (RTMP) and multicast (RTMFP) together. (This still needs clarification - I will post more on this in a future)

I am going to keep you updated - it’s seems like a little a step, but I think - that with Groups and Multicast, we are opening totally new era of realtime Flash apps!

See the Matthew Kaufman’s session (Project Lead of P2P in Flash Platform)

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