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Colten has written a kick butt new Adobe AIR application for SpaceVidcasters! There are a couple of problems with running video and chat in your browser:

• Flash Video will stall your browser after a period of time.  It seems Flash video was not designed to run 24×7x365 client side.  While new versions of Flash promise to fix this, today it is a wee bit annoying.
• The video and chat run in the same memory space as your browser.  If for any reason you have to force-quit either your flash video or a browser window, you lose everything.
• Many SpaceVidcasters want to run their own IRC client and just show the video.  There’s no easy way to do that.
• Many SpaceVidcasters want to run the video and chat window on their desktop as a little widget so they always have access to the live stream and can stay up to date with the happenings of space flight.

The all new SpaceVidcast application will fix all of these problems.  At the bottom of every page on the site you’ll see a new ‘Cool SpaceVidcast Stuff…’ section where you’ll find the new SpaceVidcast app.  Clicking on the install button will get you the Adobe AIR runtime as well as the app itself.

Colten slaved over the app for what seemed like eternity as he perfected everything.  The end result is an exhausted Colten but freaking cool app that can do a lot of things.  If you want to place the application on top of all windows on your desktop, right click in the title bar where is says ‘SpaceVidcast’ and select ‘OnTop’:

Using the same right-click menubar technique you can also select the Chat/Stream option which will pull up a single window with both the video and the chat room inside:

Of course you can chose any combination of these things:  chat on top, chat on bottom, video on top, video on bottom, chat and video on top or chat and video on the bottom.

Since the application uses Adobe AIR it will run on Macintosh and Windows based systems and there is a beta for Linux systems as well.  The application will run in its own memory space so if the Flash video dies you’ll be able to force-quit it without losing any of your browser work.

Colten spent a lot of time working on the app and it shows.  If you see him in the chat room (he also goes by SpaceKickCast as he has also written the default bot we use in the room) make sure to thank him there or right here in the comments for this thread.  I couldn’t be happier with the results and I think this is a fantastic way to get your SpaceVidcast fix 24×7!

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 4:06 am and is filed under Vidcast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.