Adobe's recently acquired Macromedia Flash Media Server is the newest player on the streaming server front. With its customizable, programmable media player for end users, this server may also be the most extensible product we tested. Now for the bad news. You can't just grab media and throw it on the Web with Macromedia Flash. But if you're looking to make advanced Web sites with tight integration between the content and streaming media, Flash is a good option.
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Encoding video is simple. This server doesn't come with a video capture product; instead, you convert existing media files. We fed in a full-quality DV stream. There aren't many options in the encoder--the main choices are the video and audio bit rates and the codec choice. We used the On2 codec for our tests. Each bit rate encoding is saved in a separate file, though the encoder software does support batch encoding.
Video playback requires a Flash application, which must be programmed with Flash Professional authoring studio. This is the hardest part of setting up the server. With Macromedia's help, we created a basic video player with eight lines of code. There is also a video player library, which is built into the studio, but advanced functionality such as multi-bit-rate delivery requires additional programming.
Depending on the level of expertise and time you want to dedicate, this product can offer more options and features than the other products. If you want to require a user to enter a user name, password and phone number to access a video before playback, for example, that can be programmed into the Flash applet. However, unlike its competitors, the Flash server cannot stream MP3 playlists outside of the Web application.
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