Quote:
Originally Posted by Ron Bennett
Firstly, what is the screen resolution of the video you're viewing on your iphone? I presume way less than that of most window based computers.
I'm on a 6 megabit cable connection and still run into issues with streaming - it's not just data speed, but also computer load. Progressive download tends to use less CPU and is more forgiving in regards to throughput ... once a stream begins to outrun its buffer, many streaming providers will reduce the playback quality, assuming the stream has that capability (not all do), and/or pause the stream to refresh the buffer resulting in the stream getting jittery or even stop / reset.
Also, with a progressive download, jumping around / replaying is a cinch, and practically instant. While similar is true with streaming, it's often limited to a buffered window of few minutes, if even that much, from the point in the stream one is currently viewing. Anything beyond outside that buffered window will force content to be streamed again from the remote server making the user wait.
Ron
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Unless I'm missing something - what does screen resolution have to do with anything? I used that as an example fora a low-bandwidth connection on a full member site not "optimised" for phones... ie same 500MB movie being streamed on iphone as the PC.
For the moment, I haven't come across any server problems *at all* in streaming movies - load is quite low (1 ish) on a server dedicated to streaming movies - 16 cores in total, 32MB RAM) for a heavily accessed members area.
I made a thread a few months back at my love for Wowza and someone came in (maybe you?!) saying he couldn't stand it because of crap server load etc etc. I do not doubt his frustration at all, and maybe under serious load (like for a very successful tube site, millions of request per day etc) Wowza won't cut it, and in which case I would agree.
However, on the server I'm looking after, Wowza is server up ~2000 streams per day (connections, so not counting scrubbing etc) and it isn't breaking a sweat, such so that the iphone on its 3G bandwidth streams quite comfortably, without any stalls. The hardware though dissing up the movies is very very streamlined with a very nice storage server handling the requests (and the system says the disk I/O is no problem at all)