Does Flash/Flex fully load a flv before starting to play it?

Question

If you have an flv of 20mb, does Flash fully load it before starting to play it? And if not, what's the difference then with streaming video?

Answer 1

No your flash player will start playing as soon as it has buffered. This is called progressive download.

If you have a flash media server you can stream the flv. This will give you certain benefits, like:

• Having multiple versions of the video at different compression rates, which can be sent to the client based on their connection speed.
• The ability to skip forward in the video without needing to download the entire video.

Also another benefit to a streaming server it that it will allow you to stream live media.