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There are only two reasons to do actual streaming of any content: A) You're broadcasting a live event B) You want to pretend the user can't save the conten
by blasdel 17y ago
There are only two reasons to do actual streaming of any content:
A) You're broadcasting a live event
B) You want to pretend the user can't save the content
In all other cases, the "sort of fake streaming called HTTP Progressive Download" is massively superior.
- drawkbox 17y agoOne other small factor is cost. Lots of places go with streaming for cost, either to limit the amount of unnecessary download or to add in ads to pay for it (or limit streaming just to their site initially). For instance a live event especially where you want to make sure availability is the best situation it can be. Also for larger movie files such as maybe on Netflix streaming is more cost efficient as lots of people stop watching or partially watch. No need to download everything at .10 a GB for unwatched content. Either way it sucks but it lives on due to market demands.
- DarkShikari 17y agoYou can limit unnecessary download with progressive with two combined tools: 1. Bandwidth throttling. 2. MP4 seeking support (usually a server plugin, e.g. mod_h264_streaming or whatever). This way you can use progressive download and still limit the user to a sane download speed.
- drawkbox 17y agoGood points. Throttling works well with a good infrastructure and haven't used seeking support but will look into it. Seems like there is overhead with streaming and seeking but maybe throttling is the way to go. Still you'd need to be able dynamically adjust it to the users connection and the data rate of the video, that is kinda what is nice about streaming which is on top.
- blasdel 17y agoAre you kidding? Live streaming is MASSIVELY more expensive than HTTP/1.1 because of the infrastructure needed to support the hard latency and QoS requirements.
- drawkbox 17y agoWe are talking about real-time, live events. Probably DRM or paid events that require as close to real-time as possible. Sure you could delay and push out chunks of video into your CDNs and then people woudl all be in different parts of your "live" event. For live events streaming is almost always required. For DRM like sites like Netflix this is also the case. Yes HTTP hosting is massively cheaper than streaming but the topic was real-time live events or controlling the content like DRM.
- DarkShikari 17y agoNot all. Here's one example of where live streaming beats progressive download: You are a website which serves an extraordinary number of videos, most of which are only viewed by a few users (e.g. Facebook). A small percentage of these users want to view your video on an iPhone, so you re-encode it on the fly from the regular file on the website to display on iPhones. In addition, this lets you adapt the bandwidth on the fly to maximize quality without the signal dropping out.
- tjmc 17y agoYou can only start from the beginning with HTTP Progressive though. With streaming you can pick any starting point.
- jacquesm 17y agoNot really, you can close the connection and reconnect with a different offset. Interrupted HTTP transfers use this to continue where they left off. The way to do this is to use the 'Range' header iirc.