Getting Red5_04 to work on Fedora Core 4

Ok, It took me a while te get Red5 v04 to work on Fedora Core 4, so I thought I’d share.

[update: also works for version 0.5]

First of all, you will need to get the sun 1.5 jdk… The jdk that comes with fc4 will not work!!!
You can find the instructions to get and install the sun 1.5 jdk here.

Next up: installing apache ant.
Dont bother trying to get apache ant via yum… It won’t work..
Follow these instructions.

dont’ forget to add the dir (I use /urs/local/bin/) where you put the ant file to your path.

Ow, and don’t forget to stop FMS if you have it running, or change the ports for either FMS or Red5
(thnx Jay, for reminding me)
And adjust your router settings to forward the rtmp ports

This should do the trick,
Happy Experimenting!

get the onepage instructions here

Black Screen Visualizer for WMP

Last year I assembled my Media Center machine. Although I think the interface design is not optimal, I’ll never go back to having a separate TV, DVD an Audio System. One thing that bugged was not being able to turn off the monitor with the remote. When I’m playing music I don’t really need to see the mce interface. So this weekend I decided to figure out how to make a Visualizer plugin. I wanted to build a visualizer that visualizes… uhm .. NOTHING… Just a black screen so I won’t have to turn of my monitor.

So I downloaded the Windows Media SDK, read the help files and found a code sample. Unfortunately it didn’t work right away, because I’m using visual studio 2005. Searching msdn, I did find a way to convert the windowsmediaplugin wizard to VS 2005.

In the sample I just commented out the lines that did the visualizing, and changed the presets that came with it.
After building the solution, I got a dll that I could register on my MCE machine.

Sweet, now all it needs is some testing.

Never test a Director-projector with external casts when Director is open.

It’s an old trap, but I had me again yesterday.
After spending 2 hours wondering why my projector gave me errors, while running it inside Director went just fine.
It suddenly hit me. I was using external casts. So they are locked when you’re still running Director, and you’ll get cast member not found errors (if you have the right .ini configured, otherwise you’ll just get script errors).

I had to do all this on a VNC connection to an installation somewhere in the countryside on a machine that was constantly rebooting (that was the error I was trying to solve). It turned out to be a hardware-failure, GRRRRRR