couple of easy questions

quote:

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Originally posted by: izdabye
q1) Are there any differences between a progressive download player and a streaming player



Thanks
Craig

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Difference in the two are streaming player offer Real-time broadcasts, Long clips, Immediate random access to different parts of a movie, Requires a specialized streaming server and can be Can be stopped by firewalls. Progressive lets you Downloads entire movie, FLV is cached on the local system, Consistent high quality playback at any connection speed and Retransmits lost packets.

On Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:32:25 +0000 (UTC), "izdabye"
<webforumsuser@macromedia.com> wrote:

>q1) Are there any differences between a progressive download player and a
>streaming player

Yes, it is. The naming show it. You can read a lot about "progressive
download vs streaming".

> q2) In my streaming player, If I drag the playhead to the right, for instance
>65% way across and release, the video starts playing instantly...without having
>to buffer....is that the way it should be?

It is not clear what you understand under "buffering". A small
buffering value is required for both streaming and download cases. It
is required just to achieve smooth playback. But using streaming
player you can navigate across your movie instantly, because your seek
command are served by the FMS. In the progressive download case you
can't seek forward, because this portion of file is not yet in place.
This is the main difference between streaming and progressive
download.

BTW, I'd like to mention, that there is a trick to avoid this problem
with bad navigation for progressive download case. It is so called
"HTTP Streaming". Using usual web server it is possible to create a
SWF movie, controlling FLV playback in a way like streaming server
does it. This technique is widely used now because FMS is too
expensive for simple projects. You can find some explanation of how it
works here: http://home.openworldpresenter.com/flash/index.php?pid=43

HTA!