Thread: Audio / Video Streaming

Every now and then we do some video and audio streaming at the moment we use windows media services, just interested to see what other people use, I know another option is shoutcast but you can’t do video with that.

It’s just a pity WMS doesn’t support MPEG4 Video!

You can stream video with Shoutcast - look at the NSV plugin (Nullsoft Video Streaming)

Have used helix in the past. Streams pretty much everything.

I take it with all of the suggestions above the client will need to install extra software, e.g. flush, real player.

This would be for live events

Real's 'Helix' server is meant to be pretty good, but AFAIK, its rather un-cheap

That’s one good thing about WMS, it's free.

I've seen a few companies use Helix, but they stream to US servers and the delay is bad.

Originally Posted by directhostinguk

I take it with all of the suggestions above the client will need to install extra software, e.g. flush, real player.

I think it's pretty much guaranteed that someone somewhere is going to have issues connecting and will need to update/install additional software regardless of what format you choose.

It's just finding one that has the best all round support. Personally I think Flash is the way forward for the majority of web streams. It's got the widest range of support, it's cross platform and it loads very quickly.

Flash media server isn't that expensive really, though as Neil pointed out there are free options out there.

Think I'll spend a bit of timing looking at Flash then.

Definitely think Flash is the way forward, we host for some rather big movie companies and flash is their format of choice.

Thanks for your help I'll take a look at flash then.