Make flash video player for playing live streaming video / TV on website or blog

To broadcast live streaming media on web page, we need to make a special flash video player to receive the live streaming digital signal from your streaming server (such as Adobe Flash Media Server).

Below is a step by step tutorial about how to do this in Adobe Flash CS4.

Step 1. Launch Adobe Flash CS4 Professional on your computer. Create a new ActionScript 3.0 document which is 640*480 pixels.

Step 2. Drag and drop the FLVPlayback component to the Stage and set its dimensions to 640*480.
The FLVPlayback component and the FLV Playback Custom UI controls appear in the Components panel.

Step 3. Select the FLVPlayback component on the Stage and open the Properties panel in Flash CS4 (or click the Parameters tab in Flash CS3).
Double-click the source parameter and input the URL of the live stream rtmp://localhost/live/livestream. Click OK to finish this setting. Now you have told Flash where to get the live stream source data, but you haven't told Flash to play the live stream (see Step 6).

Step 4. Select the FLVPlayback component on the Stage. In the Property inspector, name the instance myVideo.

Step 5. Add a new layer to the live streaming video and name it actions.

Step 6. Select the first frame of the actions layer and press F9 to open the Actions panel.
In the Script pane enter:
myVideo.isLive = true;
The isLive property of the FLVPlayback component can be only two values: true or false. This property works only if the video or TV feed is streaming from Flash Media Server. If you were not using Flash Media Server - that is, progressively downloading the video from an HTTP address - and you set isLive to true, then Flash would simply ignore the ActionScript and nothing would happen.

Step 7. Close the Actions panel, save all the settings and click File > Publish Settings. Select Flash (SWF) and HTML (.html) in the Type list when the Publish Settings dialog box opens. Click Publish. When it finishes, you could close the dialog box, save the Flash file and quit Flash.

Now you know that it is not difficult to make such a web flash video player to play live streaming video or TV on the Internet. Moreover, not only Flash CS4, but also I know another tool can do this even with no coding needed, it is called Moyea Web Player, which is free. It provides a free RTMP Stream Plugin to receive and play live streaming video in a custom web flash video player.

Note that if the rtmp address is with .flv suffix, you need to remove the .flv suffix before put it to the player.