A project codenamed red5 has been started on osFlash to work on an open-source implementation of the RTMP protocol. The man behind this is none other then John Grden, who (co-)wrote the (first) book on FlashCom, in addition to everyone’s favorite debugging tool, X-Ray/AdminTool. At this point, a part of the RTMP protocol have been reverse-engineered and there is a small server floating around (in Ruby, of all things), that can do the RTMP handshake and even pingback some data, provided that it’s less then 128 bytes long. It looks like RTMP AMF is not exactly like Remoting AMF, with new codes for audio, video, function calls and SharedObjects, and a peculiar interweaving scheme that means standard AMF deserializers (AMFPHP’s or OpenAMF’s) will fail; finally we may be able to understand the inner workings of the complete AMF format.

Obviously the project has a long ways to go, but I am very impressed at how quickly things are coming along, considering about two weeks ago basically nothing was done. Legal status is in limbo currently, and I would predict that it will stay so until we have a working prototype, at which time, MM will most likely give us the traditional vague email stating whether they’re OK with it or not. Mike Chambers has been lurking on the list so they’re not completely in the dark about it either. In any event I am not certain that the project will ever tackle audio and video, as this implies lots of talented people in codecs, and Spark and MP3 have their own legal issues. I think just a working implementation of SharedObjects and function calls would be wonderful. A more data-oriented FlashCom alternative would certainly fill a gap with the current implementation lacking even a File object. But I’m sure many will argue open-source audio and video streaming would rock. John is still looking for talented people AFAIK; get on the mailing list if you’re interested.

• Red5 homepage
• RTMP explanation
• Mailing list
• Ruby implementation of RTMP server (Rename to .zip)
• Java handshake server
• Towards open-source Flash development: The article this article’s title is a pun of.