macromedia flash flashcom: We have a professional edition and are building an application that is intended
to serve up video files to numerous users simultaneously. These files are
quite large (8-10 mb each for 45-60 seconds), and when I play them at the
server, the client apps that subscribe to the stream get very choppy video.
When I play them from the client apps, using setBufferTime, playback is much
smoother, with far fewer, yet longer 'pauses.' The quality I'm getting with
the client calling the play method is acceptable, but I'm not sure if this is
going to be the proper choice for streaming one of these files to 500 users
simultaneously. Is it more appropriate in this situation, where 500 clients
need to be seeing the video at the same time, to use Stream.get and Stream.play
on the server to publish the recorded video and have the 500 clients subscribe
to that stream, or to use an onsync or call to notify all clients that they
should create a new netStream and call ns.play to get the server to stream the
file to each client?

We may be pushing the resources of the server and available bandwidth
(dedicated machine dual P4 2.8 Ghz 1Gb RAM) or perhaps pushing the limits of
the fcs license. Any recommendations as to licensing or hardware issues on a
project of this scope?

You are pushing the resources on your server, especially for video; however,
consider what is your server connected through because I have experienced some
video feed issues on a T1, but when we upgraded, video smokes. Your FCS
license is not your problem. I'd guess from what I hear from you is that it
was a hardware issue.

Stacey R. Roestel
Eastern Washington University

?These files are quite large (8-10 mb each for 45-60 seconds)??

These videos are apparently not live, so why do you need Flash Comm. Server
Professional Edition? Why can? t you just stream it using Flash MX 2004?
However it sounds like you would need to upgrade your hosting or go with the
option of shared hosting. Here is a hosting company that provides this option;
http://www.nisgroup.com

Another option for you if it?s not to late since you bought two Pro editions,
is that you can chain two non-Pro FCS together to form one, instead of buying
the $4500 Pro edition which is equivalent to about 9 non-Pro FCS on a monetary
level. I believe that MM sells upgrade products called ?Charge Packs? that can
upgrade a Pro edition to handle more users instead of buying two. Sounds like
you really have a huge site online! Can you send me a URL for I can check it
out? Thanks.

Thanks for the input. It turns out there were a few issues that needed to be
resolved.

We upgraded the server to 2Gb RAM, upped the machine connection from 10Mbps to
100 Mbps, and stacked another professional license. We also re-encoded all of
the videos to have an acceptable bit rate and reduced their frame rate (the
original files were just too much for the hardware, and would have consumed
available bandwidth quickly).

These files need to be streamed with FCS because they are a part of a live on
demand video auction, and buyers need to get the video simultaneously with the
auctioneer's audio and lot information retrieved from a database.

So far testing has shown that we'll be ok, but today is the live test with 500
simultaneous viewers...