Also, information that is lost in the network due to errors is often ignored, so the video quality will suffer if the network is congested or having problems. If you want to guarantee the quality of the final movie, progressive streaming delivery may be a better solution. Realtime streaming media requires special servers, such as a QuickTime Streaming Server, a RealServer or a Windows Media Server. These servers give you a greater level of control over your media delivery but can be more complicated to set up and administer than a standard HTTP server. These protocols can sometimes have trouble with firewalls, so certain viewers may not be able to see realtime streaming material from certain locations.
Architectures provide the overall structure and synchronization for media delivery.
Codecs are the smaller encoding components that fit within an architecture. For example, QuickTime and Windows Media are architectures, Sorenson Video and MPEG-4 are video codecs, and QDesign, RealAudio and WMA are audio codecs. First read our article on architectures , followed by our article on codecs .