With the difficulties firewalls and proxies have with FCS and FMS, we have
built our video player to make connection attempts via RTMP and cycle through a
list of ports. If the RTMP connections all fail, the player then moves on to
an RTMPT connection. If the RTMPT connection fails, the player finally moves
on to a method that "streams" the FLV via PHP (as described on
FlashComGuru.com).

If all of the FCS connection attempts actually fail, the PHP solution works
great. The RTMPT connection stops and the player rolls without a hick-up to
the PHP connection. However, for certain users, there are times when the RTMPT
connection attempts hang for a long time. All the routing through the proxy
servers make the establishment of the connection take well over a minute. And
there are also times when the RTMPT connection attempt just sits there for
ever, never making a connection at all.

As a workaround for the situations where the RTMPT connection appears to be
taking a long time, we have built a timer into our video player. After a given
time period, if the connection has not been made, a message pops up asking
users if they would prefer to wait for the current RTMPT connection attempt to
establish the connection with the FCS, or if they would prefer to give up on
the RTMPT connection and instead attempt to make a connection to the video via
the PHP solution. If they choose to wait, then the RTMPT connection attempt,
which has been going on the whole time the message was on screen, carries on as
if nothing happened.

However, If the user chooses to give up on the current RTMPT connection
attempt and go for the PHP connection, I have had difficulties canceling out
the RTMPT connection attempt that is in progress. In doing so, the browser
hangs up or crashed altogether.

Has anyone been able to successfully cancel out an RTMPT connection while it
was trying to establish the connection to the server? I know it is not the
ensuing PHP connection that is causing the problems because I was unable to
cancel out the RTMPT connection attempt well before the code for the PHP
connection was written into our video player.

Sorry for the long post. Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks.

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Marty Brutvan
SmartPros Interactive
[url]www.SmartProsInteractive.com[/url]