macromedia flash flashcom: Greetings everyone. Yes, I'm one of those 1 post, 1 question newbies, but look
forward to contributing more in the future.

I've recently been tasked by my company to research our options for streaming
Flash videos. I've got some experience with video conversion and web-hosting,
but delivering Flash video is new to me. I've downloaded the FMS 2.0 app and
found it less than intuitive. I've also been told that presenting a client
with a simple FLV Player (including parameters that point to an FLV file) is a
solid option. My initial thought has always been that for a production
environment, you need to use the enterprise-class application. However, if
similar results can be yielded with less effort, I'm always game. Without
boring you with our business needs surrounding this project, would someone be
able to help me understand the benefits, disadvantages, pitfalls...etc of
choosing one method over the other. Thanks in advance...great forum!

BrianR

Progressive download (serving the flv via http) is a perfectly sensible option,
and lots of enterprise level sites use it (like Fox, NBC, The NYT, Discovery,
and many others).

The key differences are:

1. With progressive, the video is stored lin the users cache, where FMS
streams are discreded as they are played.
2. You can't seek through a progressive download. you can only seek to the
furthest point that has downloaded.
3. You lose some stat tracking ability with progressive.

Beyond that, there's not a whole lot of difference... so (as I see it),
progressive is a perfectly reasonable solution, even for enterprise level
deployments