I'll tell you another advantage of .flv over .wmv galleries. Earlier this year claudia-marie.com was getting shut down from an attack. And what the guy was doing was he was hitting every .wmv on my tour trailers and hosted galleries.
So to try and stop that we put in a script to allowed an ip to watch a .wmv in the tour area 3 times within a 24 hour period.
Then we found out that windows media player requires THREE requests to play ONE time!!!
Had no idea about that. So that mean that each of the thousands of ips that were hitting us were still allowed 9 times for EACH trailer and vid clip on galleries. So we were still running bandwidth and shutting down the network card and overloading the cpu on the server.
So then we started a random re-name of every .wmv on the server every 30 minutes. So every 30 minutes the .wmv's were all individually renamed and the .html was changed to reflect it.
That worked for about a day. Then the jackass changed his bot's script to compensate.
Really pissed me off.
Finally I sat down and re-encoded EVERY .wmv on the server over to a .flv by hand. It took me a LOT of time and work. And no, I didn't want to do it server side...though we tried it, and the vids looked like shit. So I sat down with Adobe Premiere Pro and did it by hand to ensure quality. And then did all the html by hand just to make positively 10000000% sure that it was right.
Too much money to rely on a script.
Well sir, that fixed the problem. FLV's are "one request/one get" And then if the user wants to watch it again...it's cached.
So anyway...you don't need to be ddos attacked to understand that .flv = ONE request .wmv = THREE requests
