Can someone explain to me exactly what a video server is? I've heard the term alot. Basically I've got a 10 mb quicktime .mov file that I want to put on a website. How do the big wigs in Hollywood do it with their new trailer sites. I'm sure they use servers with very high bandwidth and storage. Also, everyone in film tells me that quicktime is the best format to use because it has high quality picture and sound. I've also used .flv and noticed a slight quality difference. However, it seems that .flv runs faster. Please let me know your thoughts. Thanks.
ok, the simplest way to describe what a video server is & does is that it allows people to view video's in several different video formats from your website without the need of all the different embed codes normally used (these codes play the video using others stream servers). The video server also allows a video to be preloaded, so that it can start playing immediately with less or NO buffering at all. Here's a Free Opensource video server you can research & test to find out more details www.videolan.org/vlc/streaming.html Overview of the VideoLAN streaming solution The VideoLAN streaming solution includes two programs: * VLC media player which can be used as a server and as a client to stream and receive network streams. VLC is able to stream all that it can read. * VLS (VideoLAN Server), which can stream MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 files, DVDs, digital satellite channels, digital terrestial television channels and live videos on the network in unicast or multicast. Most of the VLS functionality can now be found VLC. Usage of VLC instead of VLS is advised. The network on which you setup the VideoLAN solution can be as small as one ethernet 10/100Mb switch or hub, and as big as the whole Internet. The VideoLAN streaming solution has full IPv6 support. Examples of needed bandwidth are: * 0.5 to 4 Mbit/s for a MPEG-4 stream, * 3 to 4 Mbit/s for an MPEG-2 stream read from a satellite card, a digital television card or a MPEG-2 encoding card, * 6 to 9 Mbit/s for a DVD. VLC is able to announce its streams using the SAP/SDP standard, or using Zeroconf (also known as Bonjour).
Scorpionagency is spot on with his recommendation of VLC. VLC is tight and efficient, and very optimized for streaming media as well as cheap. As to the other part of your question, you can use Quicktime, but a well optimized MPEG-4 stream can look just as good. FLV is Flash video and is getting better with every release, but I have no idea what the backend setup requires for an FLV server.
Actually the VLC server now supports .FLV too, so it's a win win! Here's the new Features List it supports: www.videolan.org/vlc/features.html
Most people serve video via progressive download streaming, i.e the file plays from a normal web server over http. It needn't mean any difference regards buffering - a 300kbps stream served from a video server or served via progressive download will both be buffered if the client bandwidth isn't sufficient, and both will start playing within a second or two if configured correctly. You generally only need the added complexity and cost of a video server if: a) you require full random access to any part of the video (e.g in a progressively downloading flv you can't navigate beyond the area downloaded - like in youtube) b) you want to display live video c) you require the file isn't cached by the browser For flash flv files you migh consider red5 or haxevideo (both open source and free) or commercial products such as Adobes flash media server or Wowza (both of which have a range of sophisticated features) The latest flash player version supports h.264 streaming. In most scenarios the on2 vp6 codec available to flash player 8 is almost equal in quality.