Apple's
Quicktime Streaming Server and it's open source branded clone
Darwin Streaming Server provide streaming capability with out locking you in
to one vendor for everything. With Microsoft, you have to use their server on
their OS with their encoding and management tools. The open source Darwin
server and it's commercially supported version by Apple can run on any server
OS, such as Linux, FreeBSD, Unix, Mac OSX, Solaris, and even desktop OSes
including Windows. Because Darwin doesn't require you to package your video
stream in a proprietary WMV package, but instead lets you use the actual
video directly as a plain mpeg file, you can use almost any tool you wish to
create, convert, and manage your content.
All of the dedicated streaming servers suffer from one huge drawback, though.
Because they all dispose of the web server, you lose the hundreds of different
features and functions provided by Apache. Basically, anything you have in your
.htaccess will be lost by using a streaming-only server, as well as other things you
may rely on such as stats. Security, is another example. There are many different
authentication systems designed for Apache which won't work with a streaming
server that just does streaming, not strong authentication. To avoid this problem,
the best route for many sites may be to use a module or web service which adds
full streaming capability to Apache. That way you still have your same stats, your
same security, your same search engine friendly URLs, etc. All that changes is
that you go from http streaming to full streaming with seek capability.
The module based solutions will be most efficient and are easy to set up and manage.
Here's one. You may find others worth considering:
http://h264.code-shop.com/trac
The PHP ones will be the very easiest, but not the much efficient.
Here's one of several:
http://polygeek.com/1423_flex_video-streaming-php-xmoov
Web services are more difficult to set up and manage, and may be more efficient than PHP:
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/s...treamingengine