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broeme
Participant
June 16, 2006
Question

Necessity of Media Server?

  • June 16, 2006
  • 2 replies
  • 247 views
Greetings everyone. Yes, I'm one of those 1 post, 1 question newbies, but look forward to contributing more in the future.

I've recently been tasked by my company to research our options for streaming Flash videos. I've got some experience with video conversion and web-hosting, but delivering Flash video is new to me. I've downloaded the FMS 2.0 app and found it less than intuitive. I've also been told that presenting a client with a simple FLV Player (including parameters that point to an FLV file) is a solid option. My initial thought has always been that for a production environment, you need to use the enterprise-class application. However, if similar results can be yielded with less effort, I'm always game. Without boring you with our business needs surrounding this project, would someone be able to help me understand the benefits, disadvantages, pitfalls...etc of choosing one method over the other. Thanks in advance...great forum!

BrianR
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    2 replies

    Newsgroup_User
    Inspiring
    June 17, 2006
    Progressive download (serving the flv via http) is a perfectly sensible option,
    and lots of enterprise level sites use it (like Fox, NBC, The NYT, Discovery,
    and many others).

    The key differences are:

    1. With progressive, the video is stored lin the users cache, where FMS
    streams are discreded as they are played.
    2. You can't seek through a progressive download. you can only seek to the
    furthest point that has downloaded.
    3. You lose some stat tracking ability with progressive.

    Beyond that, there's not a whole lot of difference... so (as I see it),
    progressive is a perfectly reasonable solution, even for enterprise level
    deployments

    Anonymous
    June 17, 2006
    Progressive download (serving the flv via http) is a perfectly sensible option, and lots of enterprise level sites use it (like Fox, NBC, The NYT, Discovery, and many others).

    The key differences are:

    1. With progressive, the video is stored lin the users cache, where FMS streams are discreded as they are played.
    2. You can't seek through a progressive download. you can only seek to the furthest point that has downloaded.
    3. You lose some stat tracking ability with progressive.

    Beyond that, there's not a whole lot of difference... so (as I see it), progressive is a perfectly reasonable solution, even for enterprise level deployments
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