I’ve put off experimenting with Red5 until today as I’m quite happy with Adobe’s solution (Flash Media Server) and Red5 is still deep in beta-land at the time of this writing.
I was able to install the server on Windows Vista and had a custom FLV stream piggybacked in a preconfigured sample application directory running in about 40 minutes. The structure is not entirely different from FMS, but is drastic enough to cause me a bit of confusion. For example, with FMS applications, you have an application directory within which are normally a “main.asc” file to configure the app, and a “streams” folder which contains any media content. With Red5, it seems there is a bit more to it: a variety of different files/filetypes to configure and very little documentation on how to start a simple video stream from scratch. In fact, I could not get anything going myself, and had to resort to a piggyback approach using a preconfigured application directory.
Aside from the initial confusion, I do see Red5 as a great product and attribute most of my difficulties to differences in the FMS framework. I’ll probably continue to experiment with the current release but am hoping for better documentation in the future. When this server reaches 1.0, I would love to give it another shot!
Thats true Red5 1.0 will be much more powerful than what it is now.
I’m looking forward to it!