Ask HN: Technology for Video Streaming site

[maheshsingh]

We are evaluating technologies for video streaming site. I am a Microsoft guy from last 6 years. Please suggest what combination of technology is good for video streaming sites on the scale of performance, scalability and development effort.

[sgrove]

Please tell us more about your budget and project requirements.

There's Flash Media Server, WowzaMediaServer, and Red5 for flash streaming solutions.

Flash Media Server is quick to setup and easy to maintain/extend using actionscript 3. Probably the most featureful out of the box, but will require work to scale up.

WowzaMediaServer is probably your best bet if you're looking to get up and running quickly on a reasonable budget and have a need to scale. They've integrated with Amazon for pre-configured EC2 instances and S3 for backend storage, and support h264 I believe. It's extended in Java, so make sure you're comfortable with that.

Red5 is the most nebulous. I lost the last week and a half to two weeks trying to get different versions to work with varying results. It's open source, completely free, and very nearly undocumented. If you have a crack team of hackers and attack it with vigor, this would be a good solution to explore - they have an initial planning setup for scaling via clustering/edge server. This is also Java-based, but can be extended by Jython, Jruby, Rhino, etc.

Without too much more information, it would be difficult to give recommendations. But the above three options should be good to get started. They're all flash though, so if you're looking for silverlight, you may need to do more digging.

Good luck, and keep us up to date!

[maheshsingh]

We are trying to build "video ad server" for delivering video ads on web-sites for one of our customer. Right now we are doing R&D on the topic. Please also suggest some good learning material for the same.

[danielrhodes]

Do you really need streaming? Progressive download is much cheaper to set up and implement.

Only choose streaming if you need to protect the content from downloading.

[edd]

It really depends on the content you are distributing too, as streaming can really reduce bandwidth. Streaming works much better if you are sending very long recordings as most people won't download the whole thing if you stream it. We found that it really reduced our bandwidth when we moved some long video's to stream rather than using progressive download.

[m_eiman]

Add rate limiting and something like mod_h264_streaming for skipping ahead in the content and you get most of those benefits.

The main thing streaming can do that progressive downloads cannot is live content.

[m_eiman]

Streaming doesn't automatically protected your content, it at best obscures it a bit.

Flash has options for encrypting content as it's sent, not sure if that's been broken yet or not. And if someone -really- wants the content, they'll get it anyway.

[laconix]

Exactly, in fact nothing you can do can protect your content (well short of not letting them view it). As anyone can get a screen recorder and capture it.