RTMP spec to be published
Today Adobe announced that they will soon publish the specification for the RTMP protocol used for streaming Data, Audio and Video to the Flash Player.
The RTMP protocol encapsulates MP3 and Flash Video multimedia streams, and can make remote procedure calls (RPCs) using the Action Message Format (AMF). In addition to Adobe's Flash Media Server products, products such as Red5 (Java, Open Source), Wowza Media Server (Java), ElectroServer (Java) and the various WebORB Servers (.NET, Java, PHP, Rails, and CF) also use RTMP to deliver streaming multimedia to the Flash Player.
This is yet another win for openness at Adobe and it should make it much easier to create streaming servers that can deliver to the Flash Platform. The spec will be posted in the first half of 2009 and it will only cover the ordinary RTMP spec, not the version that allows for protected streams: "To benefit customers who want to protect their content, the open RTMP specification will not include Adobe’s unique secure RTMP measures, nor will the license that accompanies the specification allow developers to circumvent such measures. However, developers will be free to use their own technological measures to secure content. The RTMP specification does not provide any requirement or restrictions on a developer’s own measures to secure content."
