How do streaming videos work?

Question

So, I have some videos in .flv format that I would like people to be able to view from my site without being able to download them. While Flowplayer seems like the best choice for an actual flash player.

Nevertheless, I studied this topic of streaming video, since it was supposed to make the video very fast for viewing and allows you to search for the middle of the video, etc. What do I need to make it work, do I need to have some special server software for this? And how can I integrate with this software using javascript / PHP code that I will use to display the video?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Good news! You do not need special software, most reasonable web servers can do all this out of the box. What you describe, and what YouTube does and everything else, is not actually broadcast. It is called progressive download.

Basically, the SWF player (the player in your case) downloads the FLV video and plays back what it has downloaded so far. To go to some uploaded video, it searches in the uploaded file. To skip above what has already been downloaded, it discards the downloaded file and starts a new download, but it asks the HTTP server to start giving it a file with a specific offset. Fortunately, most HTTP servers can do this out of the box.

Therefore, you just need to place the FLV files somewhere that is available for download via HTTP (just check this using your browser). Assuming you put flowplayer on /flowplayer.swf on your site and the video is / 2girls1cup.flv, you should paste this into your page:

<script src="http://static.flowplayer.org/js/flowplayer-3.0.6.min.js"></script> <!-- Edit this with the width and height to display the video --> <a href="/2girls1cup.flv" style="display:block;width:425px;height:300px;" id="player"> </a> <!-- this script block will install Flowplayer inside previous anchor tag --> <script language="JavaScript"> flowplayer("player", "/flowplayer.swf"); </script> 

I took this example from the flowplayer demo page , where there are many examples of many ways to configure flowplayer, and how it behaves.

There are two ways to improve a real streaming server. One of them is for multicast streams in which all clients are in the same place in the video, which is easier on the server. Another method may provide several different encodings of the same stream, so that, for example, clients can video with a bit rate that best suits their playback capabilities.

A lot of companies put in a lot of money so that it is very important for videos to go online. They all seem to be wrong. Stream servers are mainly used in the enterprise world, which may explain their enterprise prices.