Ask HN: Technology for Video Streaming site 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. |
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!
Only choose streaming if you need to protect the content from downloading.
The main thing streaming can do that progressive downloads cannot is live content.
Flash has options for encrypting content as it's sent, not sure if that's been broken yet or not. And if someone -really- wants the content, they'll get it anyway.