I have no clue why would anyone even consider using Flash these days. It makes no sense at all. Plugins make sense maybe for IE, and even that is a stretch. In 2018 people have moved on. Those that haven’t are figuring out how to wrap everything into Electron and serve it as an app where needed.

Option 1: flash fallback

We will replicate the flash implementation originally from the LeQue repository as the fallback, as an interim solution. This will allow us to send recorded audio, after clicking save, which will send the entire audio recording as a wav file to a specified directory within the server.

When we have successfully replicated the earlier implementation, we will learn how to program in ActionScript 3 using FDT with the Adobe Flex 4.6 SDK. We write our own ActionScript 3 with the microphone class, which will allow us to stream audio from the browser to server, unlike our previous implementation. When this new streaming implementation has been completely written, we will use it to replace the replicated flash implementation.

Option 2: getUserMedia polyfill

Implement Temasys WebRTC Plugin for getUserMedia. This will polyfill getUserMedia for the Safari, and Internet Explorer browsers. The plugin may require specific instructions to be followed.

Note: Other polyfill / plugin options are available in case the latter does not work.

The main idea of browser RTC communications is “Do not install any additional software “. If we use Flash player it’s closer to this aim than if we use some other RTC plugin.

But i’m agree that such RTC plugin will provide better voice quality than Flash.

I hope Flash Player team will add WebRTC stack into the Flash Player. It would be a perfect progress!

Flash supports UDP, it’s called RTMFP and it’s not bad I would say. But overall quality of audio/video engine in Flash isn’t good. WebRTC is much better.

* Flash is not capable of reasonable RTC in many use cases. Mostly because it uses the proprietary RTMP which is a TCP protocol and so not for suitable RTC.
* Plugin can be ‘WebRTC’ in that it is a full WebRTC stack (although in our case the AddLive APIs are different because we focus on multiparty use cases).
* The plugin can ‘evergreen’ and self updates, which means only one install required.

The problem with the plugin is that:
* It is a barrier to entry. Sometimes this is difficult to overcome (say in a contact center type use case), and others it isn’t (deployed centrally by a company).
* Browsers are moving away from plugins. Both Chrome and Firefox have announced that they want to move away from NPAPI for security reasons. Fortunately these are the two WebRTC browsers.

See everyone at the WebRTC Expo tomorrow!