About

Ben currently works as a Flex/Flash/Javascript/UI developer at Digitalsmiths in Durham, NC. Prior to Digitalsmiths, Ben worked at 360KID in Boston, MA where he helped create educational games and applications for top publishers like Pearson and McGraw Hill, Nickelodeon Jr., and Sesame Street earning multiple awards including two Emmy Nominations. Ben is currently working on Mediaslurp, a community driven media aggregator as well as being on the management team of Codebass Radio. Ben is also very interested in music as well as musical/UI experimentation. He has written several codebass.net articles on dynamic music creation in Flash, and is currently working on Flashamaphone, an open source Flash live instrumentation engine.

"HTML5 vs Flash Video": Choose Wisely

In this session, Ben will discuss the differences in serving up your video content through Flash versus the HTML5 video tag. Each has pros and cons, and we’ll discuss what is appropriate for different situations. We’ll also discuss using streaming or progressive video along with some popular video player libraries (both on the Flash and Javascript sides).

We’ll also get into how the HTML5 video tag works at the basic level and how you can leverage it if you choose to develop your own player.

Live Instrumentation in Flash

This session will cover the basics of working with sound in Flash, and then get into how we can build on top of that to create rudimentary musical instruments on tablets and phones. We’ll explore at a fundamental level how sound works, how to create sound at a certain frequency, and how those frequencies can be mapped to notes and chords. We’ll then explore how to use this knowledge right in Flash for web, AIR, or mobile.

I’ll be dissecting my open source Flashamaphone project http://code.google.com/p/flashamaphone/ to help attendees learn these concepts, and will also show off other similar audio engines.