P2P in Flash / Flex without using Adobe Stratus

Question

Flash 10+ allows peer to peer capabilities to be implemented in Flex and Flash applications. However Adobe has sought to "control" this feature by ensuring that P2P can only be achieved using their hosted beta service called Stratus.

This is to the best of my knowledge. Is there any alternate method to achieve the same?

FYI: What Adobe Stratus does is it issues an encrypted 256 bit nearId to each client on NetConnection, and clients need to know each other's nearId's to connect using NetStream. One option could be to natively generate a nearId and share it without any dependencies on Adobe Stratus. Not sure if that would work tho.

All ideas welcome! :)

Answer 1

You can use either Flash Media Server 3.5 or Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Service. One of the difference between them is FMS enables you to send audio, video, and byte data through P2P while ALCS only allows audio and video streams to be sent using P2P (no byte/text data).

Answer 2

It seems P2P cannot be done without Stratus. The alternatives to FMS don't support P2P as yet but I will keep my eye on Red5 and Wowza.