flash streaming

[Jonathan Vanasco]

On Oct 8, 2006, at 9:01 PM, Bob Ippolito wrote:

> No, that's not it. LightHTTPD does not speak the RTMP protocol, it
> only knows how to seek to a given position in a FLV file given a
> timecode. People have been doing this for a while, even in PHP.

wow, thats a dirty hack.

> IIRC there's only one open source RTMP server, Red5, but that's only
> really worthwhile if you're trying to do crap with webcams or
> microphones, or connect users together (stuff that you would normally
> use XMLSocket for).

i thought there were 2 others, but  i can't remember the names.  red5  
was the most mature

> Proxying would work just fine though. One feature that might
> facilitate good support for this would be if X-Accel-Redirect accepted
> an offset... so you could calculate the offset with some scripting
> language and serve the rest of the file with nginx.

good idea.

> Can't it play mp3 files as-is these days?

last i touched it , one could play an mp3, but not stream/seek.  the  
only way to have a 'scrubber' bar was with flv

i was using it for online music promotion, so having it in flv was  
useful as a drm measure.  there just aren't any decent media players  
that support flv, and though its easy to convert to mp3 you're really  
just transcoding-- so you can use a marginally better sound quality  
on flv than mp3 and not have to worry about people ripping the cd  
contents from an online album streamer.

it wasn't drm in the sense of 'this is uncrackable' , but it was drm  
in the sense of 'its not worth your time converting this content' .