I'm finally finding a bit of time (at 10pm) to upload a little video demo that had been sitting on my hard drive for a couple of months. The premise was that I wanted to have a play with the new dynamic bitrate streaming feature in Flash Media Server so I grabbed a trailer from Apple's website, fired up Flash Media Encoder and encoded the District 9 HD clip into 3 bitrates to .f4v format: 400kbps (low bitrate), 800kbps (medium bitrate) and 1.5mbits (high bitrate).
Video quality was not my primary goal here (as you can probably see from the footage), instead I just wanted to see how hard or easy it is to get something like this up and running. Bottom line: not too difficult at all.
I've got a copy of FMS 3.5, a dedicated server (UK based) with a decent bandwidth allowance so I figured why not release this into a the wild?
One thing that you should pay attention to is the actual bitrate switching. If your connection speed is very stable then you may right-click the player and choose to manual switching - let me know if you can tell when the delivered bitrate changes, I bet you can't. And that's the beauty of this technology in a nutshell: seamless switching between bitrates. Pretty neat. Note you can also click the little HD icon/bandwidth bar to bring up a console with stats about the video and playback.

I'm sure some of you will ask for sources, but to be honest there aren't really any to share. I just grabbed the Open Video Player and configured it completely via flashvars, so I have not even got a FLA I could show you. As for the video settings I used - sorry but I can't honestly remember. All I recall is that I downsized the clip a bit so the resolution is not the same as in the original source footage, and no other fancy settings were used. As I said I simply encoded using the Flash Media Encoder.
Enjoy, and let me know what you think.


Posted on November 17, 2009 at 11:57 PM. 3793 views. 5 comments. Print