[vox] Streaming flash videos yourself (no YouTube or Google Video needed)

[jim stockford]

    thank you, dave. the question remaining for me
is: is there anything bad about installing Flash?
    i don't like downloading (and upgrading) Adobe
Acrobat (there are other readers), to take a parallel.
i worry there's a proprietary (silo) quality that may
lock some in (and some out).
    is there?
more thanks,
jim

On Feb 13, 2007, at 1:01 PM, Dave Margolis wrote:

> On Feb 12, 2007, at 3:22 PM, jim stockford wrote:
>>> After two short Google searches, I found this article:
>>>   "Video and Audio Streaming with Flash and Open Source Tools"
>>>   http://klaus.geekserver.net/flash/streaming.html
>>> Sounds perfect!  Hopefully I'll have some time to look into it and 
>>> get it
>>> going on my baby photos/video pages. :)
>> I wish i understood why it's worth the trouble--how come
>> putting videos up on a web page isn't good enough?
>> (serious question--why bother with flash?)
>>
>>> -bill!
>> jim
>
> For any given type of video, a user needs a new player (or at least a 
> new library of codecs).  Flash video plays in the Flash player - which 
> almost everybody has or can easily get.  The Flash player is also a 
> self-healing plugin.  This means if you have the Flash 4 player 
> installed on your system and you encounter a site that needs Flash 9 
> (for example), the player will almost always do the right thing - easy 
> install, no browser restart, users can install the flash player 
> locally (one doesn't need to be root), etc.
>
> Also, the FLV format (available since Flash 7) self-streams very 
> economically over HTTP.  This means you can get similar performance 
> from a regular FLV file on a regular web server to what you can get 
> with Real or QuickTime on their respective expensive and proprietary 
> media servers.
>
> The reason why YouTube works as well as it does has mostly to do with 
> their clever leveraging of this technology - dekstop video (in almost 
> any format) to web video in a few easy clicks.  The slick tagging 
> system as well as the "here is the code you need to embed this in your 
> blog" are also incredible features.
>
> Bill, this couldn't have come at a better time - I am currently 
> researching how to do a local YouTube-ish Flash-based-video system. 
> Thanks for sending and keep us posted on your progress!
>
> Dave
>
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