Though Flash Media Server didn’t get the highest rating of the bunch, the results were very close. I found it notable that the people tested rated streamed Flash video from FMS as the highest quality when compared with Windows Media Server, RealNetworks Helix Server, and Quicktime Streaming Server.
As you’ll see, Apple’s Quicktime Streaming Server scored the highest, credited with the most reliable stream quality.
Apple squeaked into first place for its excellent stream stability, easy management user interface and price, but our testers ranked its video quality the lowest. Microsoft came in a close second. Macromedia offers excellent picture quality and a wide range of flexibility through Flash applets–as long as you’re willing to do the Flash programming. RealNetworks’ Helix Mobile Server has the best feature set but didn’t score high on picture quality. Real can also stream QuickTime and Windows Media files in addition to those in its native format.
Read the full review here.
Flash video is nice, but the one reason I still like Windows Media better is FULL SCREEN. Until you guys figure this one out, Windows Media is still the only way to go.
I have to agree with Woody. Full screen is a big deal. I have a fairly high resolution monitor at home and videos appear tiny. To be able to see them well, I need to either make them double size or full screen. With Flash I can’t do that.
I suppose I could reduce my screen resolution, but it’s imporant to me for coding. I don’t want to set it to “big pixels” every time I view vide.
I don’t think FULL SCREEN is a problem for Flash video, you could code it! Possibly a little bit more code with MS Visual Studio.
When I follow the link to the full article there is a “Streaming Media Servers Features Chart” – they have their columns crossed.
WMV is crossed with FMS2 so encoding and access are flip-flopped between the 2 products. – Yikes!
So much for editing over at network computing. . .
Hello -
I’m unclear as to how “fullscreen” is different for WMP than it is for Flash video. It seems to me that you coudl encode multiple resolutions to FLV and allow users to switch to a higher res when they select “fullscreen”.
Perhaps WMP does a better job of scaling up? I’m not sure…
MD
I still wouldn’t use anything else other than Flash to deliver video purely because I don’t want my site users dragged away to something else by one of the adverts featured in the other plugins. Also their installation process is hideous if you don’t have them to start with. More than half of the Quicktime, WMV and Real sites I look at fail to load their videos or end up crashing my browser when they choke the stream. Flash is a much simpler system to implement IMHO. Yet I do still have issues setting the buffer correctly so that it doesn’t run out before the video finishes playing.
I cannot also watch flash in the full screen, I am puzzling sie whether is mozliwośc of enlarging it from the side of the system.. hmm
I have used flash and media player for some time i feel that embedding the player into your site is the way to go …flash has some nice skins and easy to set up but media player can go full screen with one click no extra code ….i cant find the code for flash to play fullscreen with one click any imput would be much appreciated thank
Trevor
Hey!…Thanks for the nice read, keep up the interesting posts..what a nice Thursday