Hello; I am getting started with a couple new web sites. It is all my own content that I am creating. I have videos that I am using on my site. I've decided to host the videos myself (as opposed to using YouTube) so I have maximum control for marketing reasons. My content is all legal and could easily go on YouTube. My videos are related to the Pet care and the DIY home improvement industries. I have some videos up on my "test" site, which is my blog (not sure if I am allowed to mention my own site here). I have encoded these videos as flv (flash) and am using flowplayer on the site. It appears to work well. I do not plan to host any live video, only serving video from pre-created files. The only application of live streaming I can think of would be for audiocasts (Internet Radio Style Application), but it is not essential that be available on my server setup. I'm concerned that using this simple flv / flower player setup now may set me up for future limitations. I have been searching for information on the use of flv vs rtmp vs ffmpeg for a number of hours, and have only found very limited comparison information. Can anyone please tell me if I am likely to run into any limitations with the use of the flv format, and what the limitations may be? Any other thoughts / comments on video hosting are welcome. When I bring my new sites online, I will likely put them on a VPS or cloud service at a major provider, like RackSpace. I will be able to run a linux based rtmp server if there is an advantage in doing so. Thanks very much for your assistance, j Wisconsin
flowplayer is a good player for streaming flv video online. But I use the FLV player created by playerdiy.com to broadcast live video streaming on my website. I use the RTMP Stream Plugin which supports live streaming from RTMP servers: Wowza Media Server, Open Source Red5 server, FMS (Adobe's Flash Media Server) and other RTMP servers. This is the tutorial.