HTTP Blog

We all know that a video basically is the process of electronically capturing and processing it digitally so that it can be viewed later as it is the direct recording of continuous and sequential processes. The logic is simple. It morphs the stills continually on a well-defined basis which gives the form of video telecast.

Streaming of video is nothing but another type of video recording and broadcasting especially found useful in internet and networks. In streaming, what exactly happens is the moving images in a sequential order are sent through the network in a very compressed mode so that it can transfer faster and the receiving station doesn’t face much problem in obtaining the final result, hence compression is necessary. With the facility of streaming, there is no real need of downloading the entire content or anything as such.

It’s often seen that many websites broadcast some live or video streams on their websites to give the reader some visual pleasure and give real recording of the events that the viewer is interested in. The data comes through the network, gets buffered and played right after. The viewer must have an uncompressing program which does its action and makes the data or media ready for viewing and all.

In today’s world of fast paced life, none has time to wait for the processes occurring in. So there have been ample competitions in some software providers to provide faster streaming to the viewers and gain popularity. First one needs to choose the video file format and then proceed accordingly. There are several formats like Windows media, real media, quick time, MPEG-4, and lots of other methodologies. One such wonderful and faster method of proper streaming is attained through Flash Streaming. Here we underline some of its use and benefits, which it accompanies with itself.

This method is typically known as Flash Video (FLV) and it is the product of Adobe Corporation, if we are concerned with the registered trademark name and related company. Flash videos are especially hit in websites and internet because of the reason that they come up with browser plug-in facilities, which supports and embeds flash video on the webpage in a favorable way. They contain bit streams and provide higher quality of vision. The embedding for audios take place in .mp3 formats, which is widely accepted and well received. The best part of the flash video streaming are pointed out below.

• The video streaming in this FLV format enables the viewer view of the video right when play button is clicked.
• The network is very efficient and high on performance and customer satisfaction because it doesn’t jam up the data transfer occurring through internet.
• There is inbuilt load balancing capacity embedded in flash video streaming, which can smoothly transfer video data to destination eradicating busier traffic.
• The bandwidth limit is optimal for the work and it caters to the needs of the clients rather successfully than other video streaming software.

What is Streaming media?
A series of moving images that needs to be casted on a web page in the internet which is decompressed (file size is reduced) for accommodating it in the web page. This is known as Streaming media (video). When an internet user opens that particular page he gets to see that streaming video scene after scene.

Streaming flash video
When a streaming video is in form of a flash video it is called Streaming flash. A flash video has always an .flv extension just like the well known .mpeg extension of windows media. These videos are generally entrenched in an SWF file. Naturally to play that video the user needs some compatible players (flash video playing software). These video players are available for free from Adobe Corp. or Macromedia website. A user without having this software’s installed in their PC’s will not be able to view the videos of a webpage.

Standard hosting
When we say the word Hosting we generally mean one which hosts some occasion or event or anything. Just as we need a host to present an event similarly we also require a host to present these streaming flash media on the respective web pages.
These are some of the standard host websites that charges fees for hosting these streaming flash videos.

Nowadays every thing has gone digital. Everyone desires to appear at the foremost position. Many people who have opened their personal web pages on the net may need to put on some of his personal videos. Many companies desiring to make the people aware of their promotions, meetings, tie-ups, product launches also opt for this streaming flash hosting. This is because the costs of hosting these videos are very cheap. They ultimately help them to save on their advertising and marketing campaigns.

Today this type of standard hosting is employed by various television, news channel (like BBC) and entertainment websites (like YouTube). Many users log on to the net for watching news, TV serials or programs missed by them or even trailers of forthcoming movies. This means it helps these companies to earn good revenue each and every time the users log on to the web sites.

That is it can be said that streaming Flash contents using a standard host can add to a good amount of publicity for a company in a very cost effective approach.

Flash Player from Adobe Systems is a multimedia and applications player, designed and distributed by them. SWF files created by Adobe Flex, Adobe Flash authoring tool or a host of Adobe Systems and other party tools. To display Flash Video from SWF files, it supports Action Script, a programming language. Flash video can be embedded on web pages and videos can be viewed on a web page because Flash Player runs as a browser plug-in - it is one of the best methods of streaming video. So, many of the best names have gone on to use Flash Player.

It is a file format used on the Internet to deliver video using Adobe Flash Player. The Flash Player format is used popularly by Google Video, You Tube, My Space, Yahoo! Video and Reuters.com. As of now, even the world famous news channel has incorporated .flv format based media in their news portal.

You can use Flash Video in most of the operating systems. It is supported by most web browser plug-in, third party programs such as VLC Media Player, Mplayer or any player using Direct Show Filters like Windows Media Player, Windows Media Centre and Media Player Classic, when ffd show filter has been installed, and of course Adobe Flash Player.

Video Format:
Bit streams that are a variant of H.263 video standard, commonly known as Sorenson Park, comprise the Flash Video files. Playback of On2 TrueMotion VP6 video streams is supported Flash Player 8 and newer versions. You can figure out the improvement if you know that On2 TrueMotion VP6 video streams offer a higher visual quality for smaller bit rates than Sorenson Park. However, the computational complexities do not allow it to run on older configurations. The Flash Player supports two versions of a “screenshare” codec, an enclosing format that is designed keeping screen casts. These formats, however, are flossy, decreasing the colour depth as they use bitmap tile base. They further are compressed using zlib. The newer option is available only to users of Flash 8.0 version or newer.

Audio Format:
MP3 is the general encoding for the Audio in Flash Player. However, proprietary Nellymoser Codec is used when the audio is recorded in Flash from the user’s microphone. No open source program, till date, can decode the Nellymoser Codec. ADPCM format audio and the uncompressed ones are also supported by FLV files.

Delivery Options:

• They can be delivered using .FLV format to allow the availability of conversion facilities to a local storage such as a CD or a hard disk.
• It can also be delivered in a SWF format as an embedded object though the whole playback needs to be transformed in that format.
• Progressive download using a HTTP format is also available. The advantages include buffering, use of generic HTTP servers, and reusing a single SWF player for Multiple Flash Video sources.
• Streaming through RTSP to the Flash Player using the Flash Media server or open source servers like Red5 and others like VCS can also be done.