

Ask HN: Technology for Video Streaming site - maheshsingh

We are evaluating technologies for video streaming site. I am a Microsoft guy from last 6 years. Please suggest what combination of technology is good for video streaming sites on the scale of performance, scalability and development effort.
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sgrove
Please tell us more about your budget and project requirements.

There's Flash Media Server, WowzaMediaServer, and Red5 for flash streaming
solutions.

Flash Media Server is quick to setup and easy to maintain/extend using
actionscript 3. Probably the most featureful out of the box, but will require
work to scale up.

WowzaMediaServer is probably your best bet if you're looking to get up and
running quickly on a reasonable budget and have a need to scale. They've
integrated with Amazon for pre-configured EC2 instances and S3 for backend
storage, and support h264 I believe. It's extended in Java, so make sure
you're comfortable with that.

Red5 is the most nebulous. I lost the last week and a half to two weeks trying
to get different versions to work with varying results. It's open source,
completely free, and very nearly undocumented. If you have a crack team of
hackers and attack it with vigor, this would be a good solution to explore -
they have an initial planning setup for scaling via clustering/edge server.
This is also Java-based, but can be extended by Jython, Jruby, Rhino, etc.

Without too much more information, it would be difficult to give
recommendations. But the above three options should be good to get started.
They're all flash though, so if you're looking for silverlight, you may need
to do more digging.

Good luck, and keep us up to date!

~~~
maheshsingh
We are trying to build "video ad server" for delivering video ads on web-sites
for one of our customer. Right now we are doing R&D on the topic. Please also
suggest some good learning material for the same.

------
danielrhodes
Do you really need streaming? Progressive download is much cheaper to set up
and implement.

Only choose streaming if you need to protect the content from downloading.

~~~
edd
It really depends on the content you are distributing too, as streaming can
really reduce bandwidth. Streaming works much better if you are sending very
long recordings as most people won't download the whole thing if you stream
it. We found that it really reduced our bandwidth when we moved some long
video's to stream rather than using progressive download.

~~~
m_eiman
Add rate limiting and something like mod_h264_streaming for skipping ahead in
the content and you get most of those benefits.

The main thing streaming can do that progressive downloads cannot is live
content.

