The Adobe® Flash® Media Server family of products is of course the industry-leading solution for streaming video and real-time communication. Well, for most small and medium-sized video sharing sites, Adobe Flash Media Server is too bulky and too expensive to afford. Thus, people are wondering if there are cheaper alternatives of this kind of server side applications to help them to stream live flash content and encode FLV. The answer is YES.
In this part, we are going to talk about several well-known cheaper alternatives for Adobe Flash Media, namely Red5, Mammoth and more.
1. Red5
Red5 is an open source Flash server that is written in Java and supports:
It has installers for OSX and Windows. Also, it can be downloaded as a zip file to be used in any OS. 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.
2. Mammoth
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 container support for most formats: MOV, FLV, MKV, MP3 and more. The server is still in alpha phase but very promising.
3. Other Media Server Alternatives
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. Only notice that the single license costs $995.
Besides the three Flash Media Server applications we mentioned above, there are still some other choices like Sothink Video Encoder Engine. Since you may be not familiar with this product, we will take a little effort on introducing it to everyone.
For those people or companies that have video streaming requirements, want to broadcast live streams, need to allow clients to securely view their videos online, want to embed and protect high-quality streaming video, and more. Pricing at only $689, Sothink Video Encoder Enginedefinitely can be a good choice.
In fact, Sothink Video Encoder Engine is not that new to Flash Media Server alternative. It is a stable product that has been experienced for years and used by many companies and schools. The Windows version and Linux version both have been upgraded to 3.0, and it even developed visual web management for users who do not like commend-line and want to build their video streaming sites in easier way.
You cannot find the dizzy professional technique words on the official webpage of the Sothink’s Flash media server alternative for Windows | Linux. It seems that this program does not need users to know much about the code, the server, and any other tough details. And it truly does so.
Offering server-side Flash encoder and video sharing scripts, visual web control installation and management, free open source and guide for ASP (.Net), PHP Video Script, this Flash media server alternative is designed as highly effective video sharing server side software for all webmasters and video companies. It can batch upload, edit and convert almost all popular formats of Video to FLV (also support H.264/AVC HD) on Windows servers and Linux servers. It not only shortens installation time, but also simplifies the difficulties and complexities to develop YouTube Clone Websites. In conclusion, it offers:
