Installation guide

Why streaming is better
Progressivedownloadisasimplemethodofvideodeliverywithverylittlecontrol—it’sbasically
asimpleHTTPdownloadcall.Streamingisamethodthatallowsthepublishertocontrolevery
aspect of the video experience.
e advantages of streaming video from Flash Media Server are numerous:
• Fast start—Streaming video is the fastest way to start playing any video on the web.
• Advanced video control—Features such as bandwidth detection, quality-of-service
monitoring, automatic thumbnail creation, server-side playlists, and more.
• Ecient use of network resources—Customerswhopayfortheirvideohostingorbandwidth
by the number of bits that are transferred can reduce their costs by using streaming video,
since only the bits that the client actually views are transferred.
• More secure, protected media delivery—Because the media data is not saved to the client’s
cache when streamed, viewers can’t retrieve the video or audio le from their temporary
Internetlesfolder.erearealsoadditionalsecurityfeaturesinFlashMediaServer3
that prevent stream ripping and other risks to your le’s security. For more details, see the
“SecuringcontentwithFlashMediaServer3”section.
• Minimal use of client resources—Resourcessuchasmemoryanddiskspacearesignicantly
reduced with streaming, because the clients do not need to download and store the entire le.
• Tracking, reporting, and logging capabilities—Because progressive download is a simple
download of a le, you can’t easily log specic relevant statistics such as how long the video was
viewed, if the user navigated forward, backward, or paused the video, how many times the
viewer played the video, if the viewer le the web page before the video completed playing, and
so on. Streaming enables you to easily capture this important data.
• Full seek and navigation—Users can immediately seek to any point in the video and have it
start playing immediately from that point. is makes streaming a great solution for longer
playing videos or applications such as video blogging, classroom lectures, and conference
sessions, where you may want to jump into the video at a specic point rather than requiring
the viewer to watch it from the beginning.
• Deep interactivity—e precise control found in streaming enables developers to create
extensive interaction in their video applications. For example, the ability to switch camera
angles, have one video spawn another video, or the ability to seamlessly switch to alternate
endings, are all enabled by streaming.
• Live video—Streaming provides the ability to deliver live video and audio from any connected
webcamorDVcamera,andevendirectlyfromsomevideocards,nativelyinFlashPlayer.
• Video capture and record(FlashMediaInteractiveServeronly)—Inadditiontolivestreaming,
Flash Media Server also gives you the ability to record video either in conjunction with the live
stream(forexample,archivinganevent)oronitsown(forexample,videomessaging).
• Multiuser capabilities(FlashMediaInteractiveServeronly)—Inadditiontoliveone-to-many
streaming, Flash Media Server also enables multiuser streaming of audio, video, and data for
the creation of video communication applications.
While streaming may be perceived as being more dicult than progressive download, they’re
actually extremely similar—they both use the same components and the same ActionScript
commands. Streaming just gives the developer more power to create rich, interactive video
applications.
eonlypotentialdownsidetostreamingisthatitrequiresspecialserversoware.Justasa
robust data application would require you to install an application server in addition to your
web server, robust media delivery applications require a streaming server in addition to the
web server.
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