Originally Posted by TidalWave (Post 15605613)

its not about technology. its about where they are hosted.
they are hosting their shit illegal content in Netherlands and you probably have a faster link to NL then to the USA hosting where they have their paysites and "legit" content.

Originally Posted by tblocker (Post 15605685)

Nice answer, that could explain why i get big companies streams slower than tube sites ones .... still, there are some paysites that have VERY FAST CONNECTIONS, for example xmovies.com, when i download a movie from them it downloads fucking fast, and i tried several movies, i guess they are not all cached in my ISP transparent proxy ... What hosting company are they using?

I insist with my previous questions still, any paysite owner / hosting expert which is not trying to sell me their hosting solution willing to answer them ?

Originally Posted by Spudstr (Post 15606106)

Heres a great question, what bit rate are your videos encoded and your trying to stream. Lets go there. Steaming doesn't give much "buffer" for slow networks. Most of the time when people have problem viewing a stream its due to A. a crappy connection somewhere between the host and the end user. or b. the end user doesn't have enough bandwidth to watch the stream without running into play/pause/run situations.

Stream is that, it plays at the rate that you view it. when you download it sucks it down as fast as it can to the end user unless its throttled on the server.

Originally Posted by tblocker (Post 15606225)

About that i have another question you could maybe answer me :P Stream is what you say, but for example, on some tube sites, when you play a clip, it starts streamming, if the connection is too slow, you could go back to part of the already streamed and keep playing from there while the rest of the stream keeps download forward where you are watching .... After configuring my streaming server ( Wowza ), if i go back on a playing stream ( seek ), it starts downloading again from where i seeked even when it was already downloaded!

How can i cache the already downloaded streamed content ? This feature should be configured on server or player? it sounds more likely that it would be on player, which players support this feature ?

Originally Posted by Spudstr (Post 15606326)

That is not streaming, most sites use lighttpd with the flv plugin/module and just throttle/rate limit the download to look like its streaming. We've used wowza and adobe FMS neither cache/save to the desktop. This would defeat the purpose of streaming. Streaming is meant to stream and never leave the "whole" thing on the clients computer.

99% of our tube customers use wowza/fms few use lighttpd still.

Originally Posted by tblocker (Post 15606378)

So in terms of user satisfaction ( and if we understand that as playing the movies as fast as posible and in "real time" [ again, meaning real time that he feels it that way even when its not technically real time :P ] ), what would be the best solution?

Would you still recommend a real streaming solution such as adobes or Wowzas, or you would go with lighttpd and their flv streaming plug in which gives the player the capability of caching the http stream ( I guess it uses the Content-Range headers ) ?

Ps: Thanks a lot for the answers :) You really seem to know real life cases and the technologies they use :) thats what i was hoping to find here :)

Originally Posted by tblocker (Post 15606225)

After configuring my streaming server ( Wowza ), if i go back
on a playing stream ( seek ), it starts downloading again from where i seeked even when
it was already downloaded!

Originally Posted by raymor (Post 15609886)

I think the point about the bit rate of the videos is worth repeating.
Take two videos that are each ten minutes long. One is 100MB
and the other is 50MB. The 50MB one is going to take half as
long to download, of course, so it may well download fast enough
to play continuously, while the 100 MB one would be buffering half
the time.





Of course it does stupid things, it's used WINDOWS. ;)



Both server and client. The server can suggest that the client cache it, suggest that the
client not cache it, make it easy to cache, etc., but in the end it's up to the client. The client
CAN cache anything it can display, and it can decide NOT to cache anything, regardless
of what the server suggests.

You'll notice that even the simplest the simplest set up, just serving the video files
straight from the same Apache server as the rest of your site, will generally allow
them to cache and work pretty well overall. The main thing that a specialized
streaming server buys you is the ability to fast forward, something that Apache
can't always do. Contrary to popular misconception, a seperate streaming server
doesn't get you better performance, lower load, etc. Yes, it's possible to load up
Apache with 100 different modules that you aren't using and therefore increase
memory usage and add a touch of CPU usage, and many people do that because
they don't know any better. However, a reasonably configured Apache will perform
as good or often better than a separate streaming server and you get all of the
advantages of keeping your whole site together, such as having videos displayed
in your regular server stats, being able to secure them the same way you secure
the rest of your site, and generally treating them as just another file. So for a great
many sites, a separate streaming server may be completely unnecessary and
really only adds extra hassle and expense. Consider therefore what you plan
to gain from streaming server. If you're answer is just "performance" or "load"
give me ten minutes to fix your Apache config and save you a lot of hassle.

PS - Yeah some sites use a streaming server for "advanced" DRM options.
Several huge companies have spent tens of millions trying to get DRM to
work and all eventually gave up on DRM, so I don't consider that a good
thing to do at all, much less a god reason to run extra servers.