Hi everyone,

I have a client that wants to put up flash videos on his site- a few to start with then possibly several hundred over time- and these files range in size from about 20MB to nearly 100MB. He was asking me at what point does he need to start worrying about having a Flash Server to serve the content vs. just letting apache do it? I didn't really have a good guideline, so does someone out there know at what point you should consider going to a streaming server from the progressive download option?


Thanks!
Mike

Considering that the smallest size is 20MB, I'd consider a streaming server NOW. 20MB may not seem like much on a broadband connection, but on dial-up it's going to be sheer agony. We have a 33MB flash video on one of our sites and we set up the streaming specifically for that movie.

That's helpful, thanks! As I understand it, Flash doesn't do multi-bitrate encoding, so would you suggest that we create several formats (each at a different bitrate) for the users' connection speed? Currently this client uses Windows Media Server and he can encode a single video file to play back at several different rates, depending on the user's connection.