Flash (Actionscript 3): Play 2 videos from 1 NetStream?

Question

I'm streaming a video from an Amazon CloudFront RTMP source with

video.attachNetStream(myNetStream);
myNetStream.play(myVideoFileName,0,-1);

and it's working quite well. Now, what I want to do is something like this:

video1.attachNetStream(myNetStream);
video2.attachNetStream(myNetStream);
myNetStream.play(myVideoFileName,0,-1);

This doesn't work as written because only one of the two videos will play at a time for some unknown reason. I want video1 and video2 to play the same video from a single NetStream (to save bandwidth) and remain completely in-sync with each other. How can I accomplish this?

Answer 1

If you are playing an FLV file directly (not streaming it from FMS), you should be able to :

1. Load the file with URLStream
2. Wait for sufficient data to start copying the data to a ByteArray object
3. Create as many NetStream objects as you need and use the appendBytes(bytes) method

I haven't actually tested it, and the logic of appendBytes() needs to be looked at, but theoretically it should work.

Also, it deserves a benchmark. But it's probably better than re-drawing a bitmap copy at the same rate as the video, and keep the two videos in sync.

Answer 2

bitmapData can't be accessed at all because of security restrictions. I'm going with plan B which is playing 2 netstreams, but reducing the file size of the one the videos by removing its audio. I'll have to wait until Amazon allow security policy access to use the bitmapData solution.