Streaming video

From Wikreate

Streaming video became very popular nowadays. Streaming video is a technology of compression and data buffering which allows to deliver a video via Internet in real time.

There are two ways to deliver streaming video – progressive streaming and real-time streaming.

At progressive streaming video is downloaded on your harddrive and you may watch it during process of downloading. However you may watch only those parts of video which were downloaded already and you may not to preview another parts. So you have to wait when one part of video is downloaded to watch it. This way of streaming video is used for short clips. The quality of video will be much better because video is played from your harddrive. For such purposes you may use a simple web server.

To deliver video in real-time streaming you need to have a special streaming server. And video file is located there, not on your hard drive. This server is more difficult to tune up. And you may watch video from any moment, it is not neccessary to wait for complete downloading of video parts. This way of streaming video is good for movies (big size video files). Special streaming servers allow to manage media data delivering. They are more difficult in administration then HTTP servers.