You can now download a comprehensive (over 50 pages!) long white paper from the Flash Media Server 3 product page (click the White paper link on the right or simply click here).
I've only read about half of the document so far and while it contains a good dose of marketing material it is also a great overview of what FMS3 is and what it can deliver in terms of features and performance. The document describes virtually every server feature in detail and also includes some interesting and highly anticipated benchmark tests. To sum those up: FMS3 kicks FMS2's butt. Or to put it differently:
"Notice that with more percent CPU utilization, you can deliver more streams. The graphs were limited to 1Gbps and never reached 100% CPU. Higher data rates resulted in faster saturation, while lower data rates used more CPU to deliver similar connections."
I've only read about half of the document so far and while it contains a good dose of marketing material it is also a great overview of what FMS3 is and what it can deliver in terms of features and performance. The document describes virtually every server feature in detail and also includes some interesting and highly anticipated benchmark tests. To sum those up: FMS3 kicks FMS2's butt. Or to put it differently:
"Notice that with more percent CPU utilization, you can deliver more streams. The graphs were limited to 1Gbps and never reached 100% CPU. Higher data rates resulted in faster saturation, while lower data rates used more CPU to deliver similar connections."
But there was something else that caught my eye in this document, it was one single word on page 8... and I'll cover that in a separate post.
We actually got well over 1Gbps in the lab, but the OS limitations prevented us from reaching 2Gbps on the bonded nics.
How "granular" is the seeking when streaming h264 files? Does it depend on the keyframe rate of the file, or does FMS do the ol' "enhanced seeking" thing? If the latter, how does that impact performance?
Thanks,
-Jed
Digital Rights Management support
New feature in Flash Media Streaming Server and Flash Media Interactive Server; requires Flash Player 6 or later. RTMPE/SWF verification requires Flash Player 9,0,115,0 or later.
DRM has two key elements: encryption and access control. There are two ways to deliver video to a consumer: streaming or downloading. When you stream video from Flash Media Server, you immediately increase your protection.
Encryption with Flash Media Server is done in real-time with RTMPS (SSL) or with RTMPE in Flash Media Server 3.
Access control with Flash Media Server is done simply with SWF verification. Access control is much more powerful with Flash Media Interactive Server because of its new plug-in architecture, along with the server-side application layer. Using web services (SOAP), Flash Remoting, or XML you can create a system with secure tokens that provide access control over your content.
These are the basic principles of DRM for streaming. For the download use case, Adobe will be releasing new technology with the Adobe Media Player in early 2008.
Is it really there with FMS 3 which they are calling flash media interactive server?
There's some more info on DRM here:
http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/mediaplaye...
http://www.flashcomguru.com/index.cfm/2008/2/21/ef...
it seems there is no DRM solution as such in FMS3. It's just a flavour of DRM, We need something like Mircosoft DRM solution.
This is more than just encryption and access control. FMS offers no file based encryption like Windwos DRM and there's no need for it either as you do not download files from FMS.