Streaming MPEG video

I'm not sure if this is in the right place, but I've always found this forum to be superb, so I figured I'd give it a try...

I have an MPEG file and I want to stream it over the internet. Does anyone know how I would go about doing this?

Thanks in advance.

hi k89mmk,

MPG doesn't actually support streaming. What will happen is the most players (Media Player, Quicktime etc) will buffer the beginning of the file then play it whilst dowloading the rest. This gives the illusion of streaming but is actually just a file download.

To use true streamingyou need a server side engine to handle it. Both media player and Quicktime have free encoding and server streaming technologies to allow you to do this but you will need access to the server to set it up. Alternatively, coverting your MPEG file into either quicktime or windows media formats will let you embed different bit rates of the file and the player on the clients machine will decide which version it wants.

I hope this helps.

Icy

Thanks for you reply - it did help. So, how would I go about buffering the beginning of the file while the rest is being downloaded? The illusion of streaming is enough for my purposes. As it is now, I just downloads the entire file before anything is played.

Thanks.

that depends on the setup of the client side player. most players will automatically buffer the video before playing. Theres no way you can easily control this setting from your web page. I think it can be sent to Media Player and Quicktime through the object tag but I don't have an example - sorry :-(

One other alternative I forgot to mention is Flash MX - this includes the ability to embed video using the xlnt sorrenson spark codec. As this plays through the flash plugin you have total control over streaming and preloading. Flash will automatically stream the video depending on your compression settings. Its worth a look!

Do you still need help for your mpeg file?
You can stream it in real player or media player, try our website www.videoshoot.co.uk
or reply to this message.
homi

$95 Bucks a month just to stream of Video.. You don't need to go that far.. For most people the MPEG will stream while downloading. To make sure it streams all the time for everyone I recommend you put it into a FLASH File as some one sugested above. However, the case there is no need to pay a monthly fee to have this done..