FMS capabilities & alternatives

Thanks. So let me see if I can summarize this in miminalistic terms:

LoadVars/XML - request/response String/XML data

XMLSocket - continuous connection of XML data

Flash Remoting - request/response of AMF data

Flash Media Server - continuous connection of AMF data

Is that more accurate? That being said, I'm not sure when I would want to use Flash Remoting over LoadVars/XML.

So, something like ElectroServer is an XMLSocket server, but it handles the the serialization of object types for you(with the AS ElectroServer class), so it seems pretty close to what FMS does, minus the rhtp protocall with video/audo streaming and recording. Does that sound right?

You could set up a file transfer with some additional serverside. The process would be:

1. Client 1 uploads a file to server using FileReference.
2. Upon upload completion, a message is sent to the reciever (via a method call on the NetConnection dispatched by the server to the recieing client) instructing him/her to start downloading the file.
3. The reciever automatically creates a FileReference object for download.

FMS cannot transfer files between clients... FMS only supports audio/video and actionscript data. If you wanted to push files to connected clients, you would have your flash client respond to a server method, and the flash client would download the file via http.

In the case of sharing a powerpoint presentation, I suppose you could convert the ppt to flv, but typically the ppt is converted to .swf and FMS is used to provide the slide number (and accessors for changing that slide number).

Alternatives... there is an open source project working on a media server ( http://osflash.org/red5). There also Wowza ( http://www.wowzamedia.com/) ...still in beta. No others that I know of.