Article: Live Streaming from a Notebook

[Darren Addy]

Thought I'd pass along an interesting article, for those that haven't seen it yet:
Live Streaming from a Notebook

It is a comparison of the four streaming platforms that they say have the biggest "mindshare", including one free one: Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder

If you do live web streaming or are interested in it, you should probably be getting Streaming Media magazine. It will probably be a free subscription for you:
http://information-today.omeda.com/data/strm/welcome

For those companies offering streaming services, you may want to chime in on your impressions of the article (fair/impartial) what other platforms should they have compared, etc.

 

[Matt Tottle]

The author failed to acknowledge that Expression Encoder's streaming engine is available as a free download from microsoft.com. You don't have to pay the $200 just to stream.

Although in my experience EE is a lot more of a resource hog than WME9, it does create a better stream than WME, especially at the low bandwidth we use on the road. However, even 'cheapo' notebooks nowadays have sufficient horsepower to run EE without issue (I had it running on a $350 Walmart Toshiba with a slug of a processor [Sempron SI-42] and 1.5 gig of RAM). The exceptions would be netbooks, but even those are getting more balls as time goes by. While Flash may shine at higher bandwidth, it doesn't come close to the quality EE/WME can deliver on a 100-150k stream.

 

[Jason Foster]

I love how they threw in a $10,000 program in with free and $500 programs. Like putting a Rolls up against a Camry, Taurus, etc.

 

[Darren Addy]

I love how they threw in a $10,000 program in with free and $500 programs. Like putting a Rolls up against a Camry, Taurus, etc.

While I agree that is sounds funny, on the face of it, I'm not sure it is necessarily wise to assume in the software world that most expensive equates to the best. A lot of non-commercial software entities are the standard-bearers, like Apache for web servers - and they cost nothing. Other commercial entities are provided for free (or low cost) because they promote the use of a manufacturers authoring tools, etc. that are certainly not free (a loss leader).

 

[Jason Foster]

While I agree that is sounds funny, on the face of it, I'm not sure it is necessarily wise to assume in the software world that most expensive equates to the best. A lot of non-commercial software entities are the standard-bearers, like Apache for web servers - and they cost nothing. Other commercial entities are provided for free (or low cost) because they promote the use of a manufacturers authoring tools, etc. that are certainly not free (a loss leader).

I'm not saying that at all.

I've found a TON of bad advice about so-called 'free programs' especially from IT people. In the end, 90% of the time, the more expensive products ARE the better ones. Everything from CAD software, Editing Software, Office Software, Financial Software, Virus Software are all areas in which the more expensive products are better (or just simply work) compared to their cheap or free counterparts. Another common denominator for finding good software is what are the "professionals" using. However, there are some superb free and cheap software. I can't speak for server stuff, not my realm, but for the main consumer market best to NOT go with the free stuff unless it has a damn good reputation and test record.

 

[Darren Addy]

We don't want to make you feel bad, but, uh... are you really still paying for software? Wow.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361876,00.asp