Flash 8 Cookbook

18.2. Deploying Video

Problem

You want to deploy video for a project.

Solution

Determine If you want to serve Flash Video from a standard web server, over HTTP, or from a Flash Video streaming server, over RTMP, and then upload the .flv file(s) to the server.

Discussion

Content distributed over the Internet can use a variety of protocols, ranging from common protocols such as FTP and HTTP to more obscure protocols. Most content that the Flash Player plug-in uses is distributed over HTTP. Just about every major web video format can be loaded to a web browser (or plug-in/player application) in two ways:

Progressive download (HTTP)

The easiest and most economical approach to deploy web video is to upload your video content to a web server, just as you would any other file (e.g., HTML, GIF, JPEG) for display in a web browser. For Flash Player 7 and higher, you can load Flash Video (.flv) files directly into your Flash movie interface (.swf file). The major drawback to this approach is that the entire .flv file is downloaded and cached to the user’s machine, and the user can only seek to points in the video that have already downloaded. Also, unless you’re using a dedicated web server just for FLV content serving, bandwidth from your server may be taxed serving other site assets (HTML, image files, and so on) to other users visiting the site.

Streaming delivery (RTMP)

Another method of delivering video content over the Internet is to use a real-time streaming server. Web video formats such ...