Flash Video Streaming
Choosing right technology for video streaming is the one of the most important steps in making any video chat site. WebVideo offers both Flash and Java based streaming technologies at the same time. This is one of the benefits of WebVideo system where the system administrator can decide which technology is better to use for video broadcasting.
Live video streaming has several important requirements, they are:
- Automatically adjustable video/audio compression to fit the Internet bandwidth of different users connected to a Conference
- Minimum video latency a time delay between the move translation (one person moves and the other sees it after a short delay)
- Synchronization between video and audio stream.
Moreover, if there are more then two people connected into conference room, video should be transferred through the server. Otherwise if three or more people connect to the same video host, every person will share the part of the chathost bandwidth between all the people connected to the video host. As a result, video transfer speed for each person will be extremely slow. When video and audio transferred through the central server, there are several additional requirements:
- Automatically adjust video stream to fit the Internet bandwidth of the connected customers.
- Each connection should be processed with minimal use of server resources such as RAM, CPU and Hard Disk drive
- Optimization of video streaming to save bandwidth when it is possible
- Minimum latency is minimum even when video transferred through the server.
Secondly important parts, which are specific for web conferencing:
- Lightweight video chat client
- Architecture allowing to skin video chat client for both chat host and person who watches the video
- Ability of 2-way video and audio conferencing
- Video chat client embedded into the browser
- Multi-platform support. Opportunity to use webcam video chat on Windows, Linux and Max OS.
After the review of video streaming technologies our development team decided to make the system based on Flash technology. Flash allows developing lightweight, browser based, multi-platform client for video chat. At the same time Flash has pretty impressive video/audio encoding capabilities and transfer of stream through the server.
We use Red5 server which is open source and free for Flash video streaming on server side.
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