Delivery options for Flash Video (FLV, F4V): streaming, pseudo streaming, embedding

[any ANONYMOUS forum user]

Flash Video .FLV and .F4V files can be delivered in several different ways:

• standalone .FLV file
  .FLV files can be played by many FLV players
• FLV file embedded into an SWF file
  Flash authoring tools allow you to embed flash videos into SWF files. Please note that the entire file must be transferred before playback can begin. Changing the video requires rebuilding the SWF file.
• Progressive download via HTTP (HTTP pseudo-streaming)
  This method uses ActionScript to include an externally hosted Flash Video file client-side for playback.
  
  Progressive download has several advantages compared to embedding, including buffering and the ability to reuse a single SWF player for multiple Flash Video sources. Another advantage is that you can use of a generic HTTP server for offering progressive flash video downloads.
  
  Flash Player 8 includes support for random access within video files using the partial download functionality of HTTP, sometimes this is referred to as streaming. HTTP flash video "streaming" does not support real-time broadcasting.
  
  Streaming via HTTP requires a custom player and the injection of specific Flash Video metadata containing the exact starting position in bytes and timecode of each keyframe. Using this specific information, a custom Flash Video player can request any part of the Flash Video file starting at a specified keyframe.
  
  Youtube and Google Video and support progressive downloading and can seek to any part of the video before buffering is complete. The server-side part of this "HTTP pseudo-streaming" method is fairly simple to implement, for example in PHP, as an Apache module, or using lighttpd server.
• Streaming via RTMP or RTMPE
  There are many streaming servers that allow to broadcast flash video streams over RTMP or secure RTMPE protocol. For example: Adobe Flash Media Server, open source Red5 server.