RTSP in AIR

Question

Hello everybody!
I have one question.
Is it possible to implement RTSP Server as AIR application
(with using Flex) and RTSP Client as other AIR Application? This
two app's will be runed on the same PC and one will act as Server
and other as Client for playback of video files.
Any Ideas?

Answer 1

It should be possible. The flash.net namespace has the
networking facilities you will need, and AIR gives you local
filesystem access for reading the raw video in. The main risk of
failure, I would think, would come due to the interpreted nature of
Flash: it might not have enough speed to deal with real-time video.
The RTSP protocol is easy to speak, but it implies the use of RTP
for the actual video transfer, and to construct the RTP packets,
you have to "snoop" into the video data itself. A Flash application
won't be able to do as much of that sort of work as an application
compiled for the CPU would.
But what I'm having the most difficulty understanding is, why
would you want to do this?
First of all, Flash has a perfectly usable video architecture
already. You can choose from Sorenson Spark, On2 VP6, or MPEG-4 AVC
(a.k.a. H.264) codecs. You can just read these files right off the
disk and play them, no need for a server. Or, you can play them
over HTTP or Adobe's own streaming video mechanism from another
server. All of this comes for free in the Flash player, and thus in
AIR.
Second, if you were thinking of using some other video codec,
you'd have to write the decoder in ActionScript, which is even
harder, both computationally and engineering-wise as writing the
RTP code. Depending on the resolution you want, it may not even be
possible to do real-time decoding.
Finally, why would you bother with a client-server
architecture within a single machine? Why not just read the files
straight off the disk?