Having had issues recently with FlashComm, mainly synchronization issues between audio streams and video streams, I was thrilled to see Macromedia’s new Developer Center article, Optimizing Video Conferences with Macromedia Flash Technologies. I have no idea how this one got through QA. This 45 page article is badly written, offers virtually no information, and masquerades pathetically as serious research.

First, and foremost, it does not answer the issues of network lag with FlashComm. Here is the paper’s assessment concerning audio lag issues:

To date, we have not found an adequate solution for capping latency at manageable level […] we are at a loss on how to measure audio latency.

Then why the hell are you writing an article on optimizing FlashComm-based video conferences if you can’t offer any hint as to what causes audio lag and how to fix it? Here’s a couple of ideas:

• Changing the video settings
• Changing the audio settings
• Changing the server setup
• Changing the framerate of the movie that loads the video

By trying a couple of things they may have found some magic setting that helps tremendously, analogous to the famed 31fps trick for animations. The authors a perfectly good opportunity to make themselves heroes of the FlashComm community by offering at least some advice on this subject.

The rest of the paper is roughly half filler, a third of tables and figures, and a sixth of painfully obvious info. Gems like:

Depending on local traffic volume and the network architecture, you may encounter lower available bandwidth and quality of service than might be expected in ideal conditions.

Anyone who has been on the internet 5 minutes knows that. Why did you have to write it? I would advise anyone trying to write a white paper to read one research article, just once, in Nature. Papers on biology in Nature show the methods, results and conclusions to experiments that may have taken a team of ten post-docs several years; all of that in 4 pages. This ‘white paper’ goes on and on for 45 pages about a couple of experiments that probably took these guys an afternoon.

Finally, this article tries to masquerade as serious research while the authors are obviously not serious about research and don’t know anything about science. People should not try to sound intelligent about a subject if they don’t know jack about it. Here is a perfect opportunity to shut up that was sorely missed:

Specifically, the bandwidth needed to support many-to many video conferencing grows exponentially relative to the number of participants such that n² streams are required for n participants.

An exponential growth is of the form scalar*2ⁿ, while n² is simply a polynomial growth. The lesson is: don’t use important, intelligent sounding words if you don’t know what they mean.

The only relevant information in the whole paper is a link to Peldi’s blog, which should be your first stop if you need real info about FlashComm optimization. Here’s hoping someone else steps up to the challenge and creates a real paper on solving lag issues in FlashComm video conferencing.