Flex video stream questions

the question is where to 开发者_开发技巧start with streaming video over the net with flex. Please suggest streaming server type (with linux support) . Any examples of source code ?

Thank you.

What kind of streaming are you looking to do? There's different levels and depending on your requirement would need different technologies.

Adobe has their own solution called Flash Media Server (or FMS), but I'm not a fan. It works fine, but the code that runs it is all Actionscript which most 'server' guys do not appreciate since a lot of them are Java trained. Plus, FMS costs money; It's free for 15 connections or less but if you want more, you need to pay a pretty coin.

As a free alternative, there's the Red5 project. This one uses Java and works pretty much the same way as FMS except it's lacking a few features like some of the newer Adobe streaming protocols (RTMFP).

Another one that I've heard great things about is Wowza server. It's Java based as well, is free up to a certain amount of connections and is fairly cheap to buy. They have different pricing models that fits what your business wants to do and it's very easy to scale up. One big plus of Wowza is that they're also on the Amazon cloud which is a great and cheap way to have your servers running since it's a 'pay as you go' type deal.

BUT, and this is big one, if you just need simple streaming between just a few clients (like a video chat of some sort) you can always use Adobe's new p2p service called Cirrus (formerly known as Stratus). It helps people (2 or more) connect to each other even if they're behind a firewall (need to have UDP enabled however) and stream live information to each other. The only limitation on this one is the bandwidth of each client connecting to each other.

Hope this all helps.

Red5 server: Java, real-time, free, linux, anything you want :)

Some more u can try:

Flash Media Server

ffmpeg

VLC