Flaphone Blog

Flaphone updated to support AEC available in Flash Player 10.3

admin — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 10:45:15 +0000

Client-side acoustic echo cancellation support added to Flaphone, it will be available if you use Flash Player ver. 10.3 or higher. Please note that it won’t work with Windows 7 64bit (server-side AEC will be used) due to bug in release version of Flash Player 10.3, you can vote for issue to fix it faster at http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-6888 . AIR version will be updated later.

Fixed support for Speex calls for FP 10.1

admin — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 07:08:52 +0000

After updating to Flash Player 10.1 we’ve found that there were problems with Speex calls - no sound at all or big delay. Now we’ve fixed this issue and you can continue to enjoy Flaphone with new Flash Player 10.1

Zingaya offers forwarding to SIP and landlines/mobiles in Free plan

admin — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 10:49:10 +0000

There is no reason to use flaphone callme subsystem now, because you will have forwarding to SIP and to landlines/mobiles in Zingaya Free plan in addition to Skype forwarding. Zingaya offers better calls quality and additional features. In Free plan your widget still has only 1 line available, for more lines - check Standard, Advanced or Custom plans.

Zingaya service launched

admin — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 18:29:53 +0000

As we mentioned before callme feature had to be detached to the whole new service. Now it’s done. Please meet Zingaya . Zingaya is a new webservice and it’s only about click-to-call widgets. It has a lot of features which makes it very advanced in comparison with old flaphone callme subsystem: multiple lines support, UDP transport, echo cancellation, calls recording, voicemail and many others. For now 3 plans are offered, one with calls to skype only is absolutely free. If some specific plan is required you can always submit your request and it will be reviewed. Servers are installed in different parts of the world and new UDP-based protocol support reduces latency and provides with the best quality. Widget now can call up to 3 numbers simultaneously. It’s the best click-to-call solution for your site and it’s worth your attention.

Skype opens up SkypeKit SDK

admin — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 10:55:32 +0000

According to Skype they are ready to open up SkypeKit SDK which will allow developers to create their own Skype-compatible software. It’s a good move, let’s see what capabilities we will be able to use. Flash-based Skype is closer than it seems!

CallMe-widgets will be detached to the new service

admin — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 11:06:14 +0000

CallMe-widgets concept was a very good idea, we received a lot of feedback and decided that this subsystem can be detached and form the whole new service. All I can say now - this service is about to launch and it will have a lot of new great features our users asked us for. We also worked on technology a lot and you’ll see UDP-transport support, echo-cancellation and many other interesting features in it.

Apple FaceTime uses SIP, RTP and H.264 for video calls

admin — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 19:25:33 +0000

Apple announced FaceTime - video call system is built on open standards like SIP, H.264 and AAC, so it’ll work with other video calling apps as well. The problem is that H.264 and AAC aren’t open standards at all… But let’s wait and see how FaceTime exactly works. Maybe we’ll be able to call from/to flaphone from/to iPhone 4G.

VP8 is coming to Flash Player after Google opened it for everyone

admin — Wed, 19 May 2010 19:16:34 +0000

After Google has bought On2 there were a lot of talks regarding the future of VP8 video codec and finally Google open sourced it. Kevin Lynch (Adobe’s CTO) told that Adobe would add this new codec to Flash Player. Let’s hope they will add encoding capabilities as well, because Sorenson codec is very-very old one and we need something more contemporary for realtime high definiton video communications.

Flash Player 10.1 and VoIP

admin — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 11:05:35 +0000

Adding UDP-based RTMFP protocol and Speex audio codec in Flash Player 10 were right moves from Adobe and it allowed us to notice that FP was about to become a good VoIP client. But even with RTMFP capabilities Flash Player couldn’t connect two clients using P2P behind the specific NATs/firewalls, so fallback to server’s relay was required in such cases. With new features of Flash Player 10.1 (RTMFP groups) everything changes, now peers from RTMFP group will help you to do P2P media transfer if direct P2P connection between some 2 peers from the group isn’t possible. If you think a little it will become obvious that FP can be used to create P2P-networks like Skype’s one, root servers will only deal with signaling and will help clients to join groups with peers that can help in media delivery. It can be used in many services. Now we need Acoustic Echo Cancellation support and more advanced video codec for encoding video from webcam (h264, for example) to create web-based Skype.

AEC tests. Part 2.

admin — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 17:03:54 +0000

We’ve spent some time testing Speex AEC wrapped in SWC through Alchemy and finally have few points about that:

Speex AEC is working well, but in Flash it’s hard to use it, because of async nature of all SampleDataEvent calls. Although in few tests we saw it working, in real life it won’t work because of big latency and variable time between SampleDataEvent calls.
New flash player 10/10.1 audio features - playing audio samples and accessing audio samples from microphone will work only for non-realtime applications
Now it’s impossible to get audio data from RTMP audio stream and put it back to RTMP audio stream after it’s changed (applying AEC filters)

So even having access to samples on AS level it’s impossible to implement client-side AEC for Flash now. There are 2 options: wait until Adobe adds AEC to flash player itself (best solution, but unknown feature release date: Jobs is right about Adobe, they are lazy), implement server-side AEC (very complicated solution, won’t work for new flash P2P capabilities).