Streaming video on a server [file type]

PatrickD32

Sorry if this is the wrong forum?

Which filetype woudl be best stream on my server.


I have an avi video.

But would like to stream it on site via the server.


Which would be best.
Should I convert it to something like
- Quicktime Movie (.mov)
- Windows Media Player (.wmv)
- MPEG (.mpg)
- FLASH (.swf)


or leave it as an .avi?

Any ideas?
And would much picture or sound quality be lost on any of them.
Does youtube convert to flash on upon upload aswell?

Thanks in advance.

P.

Evil Phil

If you're not planning on managing a streaming server yourself, something like Microsoft media server (or what ever it's called these days) then you could host it off site on a service like Vimeo plus.

akamossie

if you are hosting yourself then use .swf

PatrickD32

thanks

Boskonay

A decent web server with streaming (and something like ffmpeg running) will let you pop up mp4, ogg, avi, flv, and stream in a browser without issue.

Here's an example running the Cherokee light web server which is optomised for streaming - http://212.78.238.61/ - thats a 75MB HD mp4 file

Cherokee is at http://www.cherokee-project.com/

jimmycrackcorm

VLC Videolan makes it simple:

http://www.videolan.org/doc/streaming-howto/en/ch02.html

dinadana

I think the best will be flash. It works good with all browsers. I usually make an html version of flash video(i'm using macvide videoflash converter).

dinadana

youtube doesn't convert to flash while uploading

Collumbo

I've done a fair bit of work with this and the best results were achieved by streaming .SWF from Amazon cloudfront (you could of course use MediaNet or the Microsoft one or any others for that matter) ... but the important bit was using RTMP. Amazon has the most flexible pricing IMO...or should I just say their pricing model suited me the best. No long subscription... never cost me more than €2 per month for a few hundred video views. Depends on your video length of course...

I tested it with flowplayer and Jw player. Identical results. Performance was excellent, and importantly I was able to click anywhere on the timeline without having to wait for buffer, and the video would hop straight to that point in a jiffy... very little latency. The time consuming bit was learning how S3 and Amazon all ties together.

Boskonay--- I just checked http://212.78.238.61/ - works nicely and something identical to that was my starting point, but using rtmp in the url of flowplayer achieves way better performance for user experience, especially if they want to straight to say 4:10 without having to wait 4 minutes to get there....