FMS server technology: 10 connections vs. $4.5K

Question

I came across this comparison chart that suggests that FMS costs about 4.5 grands (compared to $995 for wowza and free for Red5). Since I'm at the stage of choosing/learning the technology, I'd rather take free Red5, but Red5 looks like a poorly-organized, poorly-documented, and poorly-featured project compared to FMS or wowza, so I'm going for FMS for now.

The big problem with FMS for me is the cost. I'm probably missing something big here. Is FMS only for companies with deep pockets? I see in the comparison chart that they give you 10 connections are free, but since I'm very new to the technology I can't tell what 10 connections is good for. Can someone please clarify with some simple example what type of application could be sustained with 10 connections and when 10 connections would not be sufficient?

Answer 1

I think that with the 10 connections they mean that 10 concurrent users can access your applications (that is 10 ip addresses). WebORB has something similar (5 connections).

It depends on what you want your application to do. FluorineFX is free but it only supports .NET. If I were you, depending on the sort of application, I would start of with Red5. If the limit of 10 concurrent users isn't a problem, then use FMS.

And indeed, the deep pocket thing, it is frustrating. I hope some good open source projects will make their way in the future.

What kind of application could be sustained with 10 connections? Well, if you're going live on the interent, I think none. It's more meant as a developer edition where you can put your application on a development server and 10 developers can work with it.

Answer 2

WebOrb is free - you just need to mail them to get a license to remove the 5 ip limit.

Regarding FMS you could choose a hosted solution instead of hosting it yourself. Then you don't need to pay for a FMS license, but instead pay for hosting, which typically can be scaled to several hundred connections.

But if you biggest concern is the costs then go with WebOrb. It is free and it works great and supports several backend tecnologies like .Net, Ruby on Rails etc.

Answer 3

"10 connections" on the FMS means 10 open connection to the server, not necessarily 10 differents IP addresses. In fact, if you open 10 connections from the same IP, you will reach your maximum number of connections. Trying to open an 11th connection will get it rejected by the server.

We had the same questionning for our project and moved ahead with getting the full licence of FMS Interactive (4.5k$) since 10 connections are not enough for any serious project. Although we didn't actually try the free offerings, we did consider them but found that Adobe actually offered a better solution for our needs.

By the way, Adobe also offer a FMS Stream edition that will allow you to build video streaming applications for around $1k.

Answer 4

On the Adobe Flash Media Streaming Server 3.5 which is about 1000$ you can't code your own server script as you can with Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5 which is the 4,500$ version.

Live streaming with Adobe Flash Media Streaming Server 3.5 is a bit disappointing because there's many options in the config file (.ini) that doesn't seems to respond.