I'm sorry to write this message but I was talking with a friend who is very
knowledgable about Flash. I was interested in using Flash to stream audio and
maybe some video. He told me that for just straight streaming of mp3's and
video content, that there would be no advantage to either doing it over http or
with FMS. Is this true? Would higher quality video be able to be achieved with
Flash Video. If that's the case, other than live webcasting, what are the
reasons for using FMS?

thanks,

jon

Off the top of my head ...

The content is not cached on the client's machine and thus they do not have
direct access to use the files outside your app.

Seek to any part of video before that part is downloaded.

The quality could be better or at least more predictable.

Your web hosting service is probably not optimized to feed a video stream
smoothly and you might find performance varies at various times of the day.
You will find the video stopping forcing you to buffer more and more video
before play or finding better hosting guarantees.

Overall if your application needs are not robust, you can go with
progressive downloads. If they are robust mission critical, you should
investigate FMS as an alternative.

You should be able to switch between progressive downloads of videos and FMS
serving them without a major or no change to your Flash movie for most
routine types of apps. So you can go either way.



--
Lon Hosford
www.lonhosford.com
May many happy bits flow your way!
[quoted text, click to view]
I'm sorry to write this message but I was talking with a friend who is very
knowledgable about Flash. I was interested in using Flash to stream audio
and
maybe some video. He told me that for just straight streaming of mp3's and
video content, that there would be no advantage to either doing it over http
or
with FMS. Is this true? Would higher quality video be able to be achieved
with
Flash Video. If that's the case, other than live webcasting, what are the
reasons for using FMS?

thanks,

jon