Guest | Media Streaming
What is meant by http Streaming?
HTTP streaming is a good option for websites with modest traffic, i.e. less than 25 people viewing the same video at the same time. For heavier traffic a more serious streaming solution should be considered.
With a HTTP Streaming capable media player, you can seek to not-yet-downloaded parts of the media.You can start watching from the middle, or wherever you position the ‘selector’. This feature works by doing HTTP calls or downloads of the video. HTML5 has by default HTTP Streaming enabled by default, capable of working in all browsers.
HTTP Pseudostreaming does not work by default on any webserver. A serverside module is needed to enable it. This is enabled in our media server. In addition to using a serverside module, pseudostreaming can be enabled by using a serverside script (in e.g. PHP or .NET). We do not advise this, since such a script consumes a lot of resources, has security implications and can only be used with FLV files.)
When using progressive downloading of videos, there are some disadvantages.
It is limited to 25 viewers at the same time for the same video. If your traffic (number of visitors) is high, HTTP streaming videos may not work for you since it will not be able to handle the larger traffic loads. You can't stream live video, since the HTTP method only works with complete files stored on the server. End viewer will not be able to fast-forward to the end of the clip until the whole video file is downloaded. When using HTTP streaming video files, it is not able to read and adjust to the data rate (end users' connection speed) automatically. As a result, if you want to create individual versions for various speeds, it will be needful for you to create separate video files for each speed. These things won't bother most website producers — it's normally only when you get into heavy traffic that you should be worried about them.
