Multicast Explained in Flash 10.1 P2P
July 1st, 2010
Multicast is one of the features of Flash Player 10.1 and it enables you to distribute NetStreams across the peer-to-peer mesh. It can be audio, video or even pure data stream (AMF3) - the data stream can be very handy for games, it’s much better for such purpose (like sending realtime positions, directions) than using Posting as Posting is more optimized for large number of senders to send something - like chat, status change and so on.
Difference between Unicast and Multicast
Unicast
Unicast simply delivers streams from a server to n clients. For this purpose you can use Flash Media Server and TCP protocols such as RTMP/T/S/E or HTTP protocol. Unicast also costs you a lot of resources -> 1 MBps stream delivered to 1000 clients means 1 GB upstream from server - which is CPU demanding and network transit is also huge.
Basics of P2P in Flash
May 31st, 2009
This videotutorial explains the basics of working with P2P (peer to peer) in Flash Player 10.
I made this tutorial with focus on simplicity of this fantastic feature of Flash. There are bunch of articles and examples in the world showing how to create your own P2P app, but most of them are very complex or hard to catch.
In this tutorial you’ll get idea how to connect two different peers and exchange data between them with ActionScript 3.0 and Flex only.
Prerequsites:
- familiarity with ActionScript 3 and Flex Framework
- Flash Player 10 Debug version installed download
- Flex Framework 3.3+ download
Videotutorial: http://flashrealtime.com/tuts/p2p-in-flash.html (20 min.)
Try: P2P demo (run in two browsers, explained in video)
Source: download P2P.mxml.zip
Note: Programatically the main P2P logic is not to connect peers together just via NetConnection, but by defining peerIDs to NetStream.
PS: don’t forget to change your Flex Compiler settings to use Flash Player 10
Btw: nice P2P Mill Game done by my friend Pavel Šimek http://nestor.cz/mill/
Good Luck!
