A separate Dell 900-MHz Intel box was set up as our primary media server. The encoder machine also was bootable as a Windows 2000 server with all three streaming media servers installed, letting us test splitting. Each player was installed on each system as well. Although each streaming-media platform has unique strengths and weaknesses, they all work pretty much the same way. For on-demand streaming, you use encoder software to convert static media files into a highly compressed format suitable for streaming, then transfer the resulting files into a content directory on the streaming server.
Users can then request and stream the resulting encoded content.
We captured at 240 by 180 pixels, converted to 192 by 144 pixels, fed those files into our encoders, copied to the appropriate server and streamed. Because the Osprey card cannot generate QuickTime or MPEG files, we used only AVI files for our tests. We experimented with encoding multiple bit rates, and we set up live encoding for Real and Windows Media. We also examined the products' administrative and monitoring interfaces and features, and we created a simulated live broadcast from a static file and used it to test splitting. Each vendor promises high quality at reasonable bandwidth, but RealNetworks, which offers the only server platform that isn't free, touted its ability to achieve higher quality at a very low bandwidth cost.