Most of medium and small video sharing sites only need a server side application that can help to stream live content using Flash and encode FLV. In that case, affording powerful Adobe Flash Media Server is not necessary, not to mention it is not that affordable.
So it comes with lots of similar questions, just like “is there any cheap alternative to Flash Media Server?”
There always be.
First, let’s talk about the well-known Flash Media Server alternatives Red5, Mammoth and Wowza.
Although many users complain that Red5 is not easy to setup, very hard to use and do not offer any helpful tutorial, it is still a top choice for free alternative.
Red5 is an open source Flash server that is written in Java and supports:
• streaming audio/video (FLV, MP3, F4V, MP4, AAC, M4A)
• recording client streams (FLV only)
• shared objects
• live stream publishing (Sorenson, VP6, H.264, MP3, AAC and more)
It has installers for OSX and Windows. Also, it can be downloaded as a zip file to be used in any OS.
Learning from Red5 code, Mammoth is also an open source Flash streaming server that is built with C++ and can run on Windows and *nix OSs. It can stream all Flash codecs like H.263, H.264, mp3, vp6, speex, nellymoser, etc.
By using FFmpeg it has has container support for most formats: mov, flv, mkv, mp3 and more. The server is still in alpha phase but very promising.
As for Wowza Media Server, it is a high-performance media server that takes H.264 content to any screen – the desktop, mobile and the living room – for unified streaming to all popular media platforms. The single license costs $995.
There still some other choices, like the new Flash media server alternative: Sothink Video Encoder Engine for Adobe Flash.
