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Streaming Audio

  • 17-09-2005 3:07pm
    #1
    Rollo Tamasi
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 3,514 ✭✭✭


    Hi guys, whats the best technology to use to stream audio over the net? I'll be putting togehter a site fairly soon which will require the user to stream audio files that are about 70-90Mb's in size.

    I have so far looked at the flash player, real audio & the flash communication server.

    RealPlayer is specifically designed for the streaming of audio. .ra files tend to have better quality than streamed mp3's, there is very little "drop" while streaming with .ra files. However most users dont have realplayer installed on their PC's, especially if they are behind a corporate firewall (college or work enviornment) becuase the port the .ra files come thru are nearly always blocked for security reasons. Another drawback is that if i was to use .ra for the streams then would i not have to create duplicates of the audio files if they wanted to download the file as a .ram / mp3? This would take too much effort and take up resources on the server

    The benefit of using flash to stream an mp3,...the user will probably not have to install a plugin and i'll have total control of the GUI of the flash file, plus the size of the swf wouldn't be a problem, and it wouldn't require an application to load to play the mp3 externally from the browser. However, you cant skip thru the mp3 file while its streaming. I'm basing that on my knowledge of combining flash streaming with xml playlists, i might be wrong thou, please let me know if i am.

    The Flash Comm Server seems to have a lot of good things going for it..such as it allows the user to skip thru the track while it streams, and it also prevents the mp3 from caching to the temp folder of the user while streaming. It also uses XML playlists more appropiately than flash. However, the drawback is, that the Comm Server is a fairly new technology and is not supported by my host...so unless anyone here knows of a third party host who could provide the technology for a reasonable enough fee, then its out the window!

    I have not yet looked into use the windows media player for streaming or winamp. IMO winamp is the greatest media player you can get, but i think it fails under the same problems i expressed earlier with the realplayer. Does anyone know of any other alternatives?

    Any advise would be greatly appriciated....


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