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File Formats

When streaming videos over the Internet you must decide to encode your videos in either MP4 or FLV formats. Most servers and players support both file formats. I personally recommend using MP4 because you get DVD quality videos at a much smaller file size. It also uses less CPU on client machines and it works on mobile phones. The downside to MP4 is that the videos will take longer to load than an FLV video.

FFMPEG is a great free and very powerful encoder, but can be somewhat difficult to learn. It supports many popular video formats and has many options to configure. Bitrate is probably the most important factor in determining the quality and file size of your video. If your video contains lots of action and motion it will need to have a higher bitrate. Youtube encodes their normal videos at a bitrate of 200kbps and their high quality videos at 900kbps. Be wise in picking a bitrate because the higher it is the more likely users will experience streaming problems.

Streaming and Servers

There are three different types of streaming. These types are progressive download, pseudo streaming, and RTMP. Progressive download is just like downloading any file off the Internet expect that the user can begin watching the part that has downloaded. The downside to this is that it is very load and bandwidth intensive and the user can not skip to parts of the video that have not been downloaded yet.

Pseudo streaming is just like progressive streaming except that it allows the user to skip around in the video even to parts that have not been downloaded yet. Youtube is a greate example of pseudo streaming. Pseudo streaming is usually enabled through the use of mods or plugins on HTTP servers such as Apache, Lighthttpd, or Nginx. Pseudo streaming is also a lot less load intensive and provides ways to throttle bandwidth.

RTMP streaming was created by Adobe Flash and provides ways to stream secure copyrighed content. Unlike progressive download and pseudo streaming, RTMP does not download to the clients computer or browser’s cache but only buffers a small bit into the flash players memory. Some popular servers that support this type of streaming are Red5, Wowza, and Flash Media Server.

Players

Many different players can be found across the Internet but there seems to be two feature rich players that dominate the market. Both Flowplayer and JW Player provide features like plugins, JavaScript API, and skins. Both are great players having slight differences and offerings making it a matter of user preference on which to use.