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What would be the best way to deal with large streaming media content in Intranet. We have a 50 MB file that is to be loaded to our Intranet site. Currently we have just pointed it to a file location instead of using a Data Streaming Server. This will download to each client when selected and is obviously not a good approach to accessing streaming media when accessing from overseas offices.

Any suggestions?

Cheers, Magic

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    What player software are you using on your clients and do you wish to broadcast this content (i.e. all clients see the content at the same time) or will you be using a per-client streaming model where each client starts playback when they wish? – Chopper3 Aug 13 '09 at 11:19
  • the player that we use is Windows Media Player. The link is hosted on our homepage and when clients click (whenever they wish) it will play. –  Aug 13 '09 at 12:02
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    FMS will not work with WMP as far as I am aware. You might need to look into the Windows streaming server - I forget its name right now as I've never used it, but it's a standard component in Windows 2000, so I assume 2003 and 2008 as well. – Mark Henderson Aug 13 '09 at 21:01

2 Answers2

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Check this out http://www.iis.net/media

Vivek Kumbhar
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  • +1. Yes, only a link - but then, an admin should know or be willing to learn about the stuff that is arelady in there with his windows license. Why bother with thrid party software that does less than the already paid for windows license (nuless yuo pay again, an then the question is - what for)? – TomTom Dec 23 '11 at 12:21
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For intranet use, we just use the Adobe Flash Streaming Server (a subset of Flash Media Server, or FMS). We didn't bother to buy a license for it, as it will happily stream 10 concurrent users at once in trial mode, and this was enough for us (and we do have a licensed version running our public facing websites).

We run on a Windows server and it was a doddle to set up and configure, and because you can use the RMTP protocol virtually any flash based player will be able to stream the content (proper streaming, not progressive HTTP streaming).

Mark Henderson
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  • what's wrong with progressive http streaming? – Chopper3 Aug 13 '09 at 11:48
  • Absolutally nothing, except when you have a 6 hour video and someone wants to start watching it at Hour 5 and they dont want to wait for the first 4 hours to cache beforehand – Mark Henderson Aug 13 '09 at 11:55
  • Thanks a lot, however, a silly question. Either way - using a web server or a streaming server, it will definitely download the 50 MB file to the client PC right? –  Aug 13 '09 at 12:17
  • Also, are there any comparitive study mentioning by how much will the network impact be lowered by using a streaming server? Thanks much! –  Aug 13 '09 at 14:13
  • If you went the path of Flash Streaming Server, no, the 50Mb files does NOT end up on the client PC. It stays on the server only (you can still 'steal' the file from the FMS, but under normal circumstances it won't). If you use progressive HTTP (i.e. just set the video to load from 
    http://server/myvideo.flv
    ) then the file will be cached into the users temporary files.     – Mark Henderson Aug 13 '09 at 21:00