Rich Media Project FLV Player

Media Project FLV Player - progressive download player In a progressive download, content must be buffered (preloaded) to memory before a recipient can play it. Progressive movies generally should not be made to last more than a few minutes. Content plays as soon as it is available, so on fast enough connections, progressive movies can appear to be streaming. However, if a user wants to jump ahead half an hour in such a presentation, he or she must download everything from the point currently in view to the point of interest.

Progressive downloads do have advantages. The goal of a progressive download is high quality at any connection speed. Given its superior quality, progressive video has proven very popular in the entertainment industry. It may take a lot longer for a user on a 28.8 kbps modem connection to download the same clip as someone with a much faster cable modem, but once downloaded; the clip will have exactly the same quality on each machine.

Progressive downloads are sent using two different protocols, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and File Transmission Protocol (FTP). Both can be delivered using ordinary Web servers. FTP and HTTP are part of the connection-oriented protocol suite called Internet Protocol/Transmission Control Protocol (IP/TCP).

Connection-oriented protocols guarantee the safe delivery of every packet sent. If a packet is lost, the server continues re-transmitting it until the packet is delivered or the connection is lost. Since progressive downloads use the same protocol as common Web content, there is less a chance of encountering problems getting past firewalls than with content from a streaming server.

Progressive video can also take advantage of more advanced methods of compression than streaming video, such as Two-Pass Variable Bit Rate (VBR) encoding. It can take as much as 1,000KB for a streaming file to imitate the quality of a 600KB file compressed using Two-Pass VBR.

Here are some key features of "Rich Media Project FLV Player":