Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Streaming Media Servers: Page 10 of 15

 

 

 


 

 

Sorry,

 

your browser

 

is not Java

 

enabled

??? Click above to view

???
What is an Interactive Report Card?
 

 

Flash delivered the best video quality. Images were sharp, vibrant and smooth, but text rendering was a little fuzzy. We found Flash's stream was stable, with only occasional rebuffering. During our 2 percent packet loss test, the video paused three times during playback for 20 seconds, then 25, then 12, but we didn't lose any frames or notice any additional artifacts in the video.

 

The server is configured through a Web-embedded Flash application. You can centrally manage and get reports for multiple Flash media servers. Although this functionality isn't advanced, at least it's there. Reporting allows for a real-time graph of active connections, bandwidth utilization, CPU and memory use, but Flash doesn't include historical graphs.

Adobe Macromedia Flash Media Server 2. Adobe Systems, (800) 457-1774, (408) 536-6000. www.adobe.com

As with Macromedia Flash, Helix Mobile Server comes with a separate price for the Real media encoder and server license. The Helix server, however, is more versatile in one key respect: It can broadcast itself, QuickTime and Windows Media. We propped up the custom stream delivery score for this feature. If you're committed to delivering the same video in multiple video forms, this product is the way to go. This added to the stream delivery score, though Windows Media Server and Darwin are both free to install and use. For our tests, we looked at RealNetwork's native format.