Pardon my ignorance, but I am researching making a video chatroom, and what I am finding just seems really counter intuitive to me. From what I have read, it sounds like the standard is for each user to stream their video to a media server, like red5, and then the server sends the stream to the other person. Intuitively it seems like this just adds a middle man that would add lag to the video streaming because it has to go to a server, then turn around and go to a person, rather then just directly to a person. Why not just p2p with something like adobe status/Cirrus? Just use the service to get the other users ip, and then stream them your video directly? Yet, it seems like almost everyone uses an FMS like red5..
What am I failing to understand here? What is the advantage of having this "middle man"?
It would require lots of bandwidth (download speeds may be high enough but uploads are usually low) to send the video to the viewers. NAT makes it difficult to connect to a specific computer (from the public side there is only one IP for the computers under the router).