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First, keep in mind that streaming versus saving to hard drive are
only SUGGESTIONS to the browser. The bad guys can easily save
whatever they want to the drive. Notice I said streaming versus
saving, NOT streaming versus downloading - all video is downloaded.
The difference is ether it's watched WHILE it's downloaded or AFTER
it's downloaded. To the bad guys, it makes little or no difference.
To the good guys, it's about what's convenient for them and personal
preference, and about compatibility. A plain link to an unpackaged
unpackaged mpeg4 file will play on any system, a desktop running
any version of Windows, a Mac, a mobile phone, a Playstation, any
Linux machine - it works well for all customers. If you wrap that same
video with embed tags in an attempt to stream it, it will likely not work
in some old version of IE, or in the next version about to come out,
certainly won't work on most mobile phones, probably won't work
on the Playstaton, and will be a pain on Mac or Linux, so you're
turing away perfectly good paying customers. Flash is an extreme
example of this, in some ways, because it won't work at all on Microsoft's
latest operating systems, Vista 64 and XP 64, so with Flash as the only
option it's not Mac, Linux, or mobile users you're turning way - it's the
with the brand new Windows systems. Those of who have been
running Linux 64 bit for years have a beta Flash player, but the
Windows 64 people don't. Macromedia and Adobe have been promising
for years that they'll release one "real soon now", but don't hold your
breath. They said it was coming soon in like 2005, so offering only
Flash is definitely the worst idea.
A simple link to the video file probably WILL stream for most people,
if the MIME type is correctly set on your server, and they can right
click to save it to their drive if they wish. So that simple link to the
video is probably sufficient, but there's no reason not to offer an
embedded player as well.
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