jtara - 5:58 pm on Sep 30, 2007 (gmt 0)

BTW, *most* sites today that allow you to view videos "online" actually use what is called "progressive download".

That simply means making a file available for download, and supplying an inline viewer that will start showing the video once a bit of it is buffered, while continuing to download the video in background.

For the webmaster, there's little if any difference from simply making the videos available for download. You plop them in a directory somewhere and let the webserver serve them. Other than that, you just have to select an embeddable viewer (Java, Flash) and put it in a web page somewhere.

I think you're thinking this is more complicated than it actually is. Yes, if you had a high-volume site that only allows inline viewing, you'd want to install a special video server (at considerable expense and trouble to set-up). Most sites don't need it.

A real video server will allow a user to index to a particular part of the video, and the server will skip over the parts before the index point. With progressive download, the portion being skipped has to be downloaded. And that's about the only practical difference between the two approaches.