I have a client who wants to convert a 90 minute video to a flash
video (swf/flv), then have a bunch of people (possibly as many as
1000) come to his site and watch that video on a specific date and at
a specific time (all at the same time).
This client has a dedicated server in a data center with a 100Gbits/s
data line currently being used at less than half capacity.
Here's what I've come up with:
On another client's site, there is a 71 second video clip (FLV file)
that takes up 3.7MB of disk space. That's about 55KBytes/s -- I
believe this is approximately 550kbits/s, depending on the overhead of
TCP/IP.
Based on some other information I read, I believe the sampling rate
for this video is probably higher than it needs to be. I understand a
sampling rate of 250kbits/s is considered high quality. But to be
conservative, I will assume the same number of "bytes per second" for
my calculations.
(Is this a safe number to assume?)
Now, based on this number of 550kbits/second, 1000 users will require
550,000 kbits/second, which is the same as 550 Mbits/second, or just
over 1/2 Gbits/second.
If this is correct, and given that we have about 50Gbits/second of
excess capacity at the data center, it seems that my client would be
okay with regards to bandwidth.
Question 1: Is this an accurate conclusion?
Question 2: Since these are swf/flv files, and since we do NOT have a
Flash Communications Server, I believe the videos won't be truly
streaming, but will download to the user's system at whatever speed
their internet connection allows ("progressive download"). Is this
true? If so, does that cause a problem with my above conclusion?
Question 3: My client's dedicated server is a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 with 512MB
RAM, running with Linux/Apache . . . can it handle this scenario without
choking?
And finally, Question 4: If this setup cannot be relied on to deliver
the video to everyone in an acceptable manner, what other options (in
the way of flash hosting, other technologies, etc.) do we have?
Thanks! |
