Which is the best Flash H.264 HTTP Streaming method?

Question

I'm looking into streaming of prerecorded h.264 videos of HTTP. I'm running into too many firewall problems using RTMP.

Are people picking up on the new Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming approach? http://www.adobe.com/products/httpdynamicstreaming/

Anybody with positive experiences using Akamai HD? http://wwwns.akamai.com/hdnetwork/demo/flash/zeri/index.html

Or is the older HTTP Pseudo Streaming still the way to go? http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player/jw-player-for-flash-v5/12534/video-delivery-http-pseudo-streaming

I found it striking that none of the online encoding services I looked at support the F4F and FMF Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming formats.

http://www.encoding.com http://heywatch.com/page/home http://zencoder.com http://www.pandastream.com

Ideal would actually be an OSMF plugin that supports Apple's m3u8 HTTP Streaming approach, because no special server components are required and it would be compatible with iphone and android 3. But that plugin doesn't appear to exist yet and I have too many time/budget constraints in the project to write such a plugin myself.

Answer 1

Adobe's HTTP Streaming mechanism is the best approach if it works in your situation (either you can use their streaming server, another compatible one like Wowza, or can use their tools to break up the videos and host the separate parts). This is better than RTMP when you're having firewall issues. It's also better than Pseudo streaming since the client side code to handle playing separate parts is entirely contained in the Flash player and is easier for you to implement and can provide a smoother result. Additionally, since the player is putting the videos back together you're not throwing away downloaded video upon seek as is often the case with pseudo streaming.

That said, pseudo streaming is still a very good option. It's pretty much the same thing as Adobe's HTTP streaming but is implemented outside the player and most often (but not necessarily) will discard downloaded video upon seek outside the downloaded section.

I can't say for certain but I suspect the reason you won't see a lot of support for Adobe's HTTP streaming standard outside Adobe-specific products is that there are three totally distinct HTTP streaming "standards" that do the exact same thing in a totally incompatible way (Adobe, Apple, and Microsoft). If these three somehow eventually agree on a standard, 3rd party tool support should be easier to find.

Answer 2

F4F and F4M are not really encoded. You encode your videos into MP4 and process them using the command line Adobe F4F Packager (for Windows or Linux). This produces your F4F and F4M files, the MP4 file is not transcoded again just indexed and maybe split into segments if you want it to.