Tag Archives: amf

AMF0/3 encoding/decoding in Node.JS

Post Syndicated from Anonymous original http://deliantech.blogspot.com/2014/06/amf03-encodingdecoding-in-nodejs.html

I am writing my own RTMP restreamer (RTMP is Adobe’s dying streaming protocol widely used with Flash) in Node.JS.
Although, there are quite of few RTMP modules, no one is complete, nor operates with Node.JS buffers, nor support fully ether AMF0 or AMF3 encoding and decoding.
So I had to write one on my own.
The first module is the AMF0/AMF3 utils that allow me to encode or decode AMF data. AMF is a binary encoding used in Adobe’s protocols, very similar to BER (used in ITU’s protocols) but supporting complex objects. In general the goal of AMF is to encode ActiveScript objects into binary. As ActiveScript is a language belonging to the JavaScript’s familly, basically the ActiveScript’s objects are javascript objects (with the exception of some simplified arrays).
My module is named node-amfutils and is now available in the public NPM repository as well as here https://github.com/delian/node-amfutils
It is not fully completed nor very well tested as I have very limited environment to do the tests. However, it works for me and provides the best AMF0 and AMF3 support currently available for Node.JS – 
  • It can encode/decode all the objects defined in both AMF0 and AMF3 (the other AMF modules in the npm repository supports partial AMF0 or partial AMF3)
  • It uses Node.JS buffers (it is not necessary to do string to buffer to string conversion, as you have to do with the other modules)

It is easy to use this module. You just have to do something like this:

var amfUtils = require('node-amfutils');
var buffer = amfUtils.amf0Encode([{ a: "xxx"},b: null]);