Questions[video-hosting](server)

I have small network with 50+ users with SBS 2003, MOSS 2007 and File server (all Microsoft software). We've got some video's that we want to share with users without them being able to save it and take home (don't want them to end up on youtube).

How to approach this ? What possible solutions could I use for this considering software I have and limited resources to buy additional software (although reasonably priced would be ok)? I guess having it on MOSS would be best idea (although I guess I would have to convert it someway and put it up properly) but other ideas are welcome?

The CEO wanted everyone in the company to view a 5 minute video. I signed up for a corporate account with Vimeo and hosted the video there. We sent out a global email with the link at 9:30 this morning. By 9:45, we received a dozen complaints of stuttering video, slow loads and failed loads. Vimeo performed fine, but everyone going through the corporate proxy had a problem. We have a 50Mb pipe from the ISP and 1200 employees at the corporate office plus 500 more worldwide.

How would you have handled this differently given our infrastructure?

I'm looking for practical answers, not just technical solutions. In the future, should we announce to small groups at different times? Host the video internally for the corporate office? Open to all suggestions.

I'm trying to evaluate some SSDs for a video on-demand use-case. We've done some benchmarking tests on them, but we'd like to get an idea of the number of video streams that they can support with a more realistic load test than typical benchmark tools.

So far, I've done this:

• fill the SSD with movie files
• remotely mount that SSD on other servers
• run a script from these other servers, that launches a bunch of VLC instances randomly on loop on one of these files. (NB: the VLC instances are running with the options --vout dummy --aout dummy --codec dummy so that it requests the file continuously, but doesn't do any decode on it to save on CPU)

I also have a settop box that decodes from that same SSD. The idea is to see if we can visually notice when the SSD performance starts to fall apart.

I'm getting decent results but the main problem is that the load servers hit a limit (in the 700-800 range with 10-12GB of RAM) in the number of streams they can grab. It looks like it's due to a lot of swapping happening all at once, pushing iowait sky high and making the server almost irresponsive.

To put it in a nutshell, my questions are:

• does that setup make sense?
• can you think of another way to do this?
• can you think of tweaks not to have the load servers become irresponsive after a certain number of streams? (I played a bit with /proc/sys/vm/swappiness but it didn't seem to make a difference)

Thanks,

Tim

Is there a possibility to store nginx locations in DB instead of the config to serve them dynamically?

The task is to create dynamic URLs for video files based on user's IP and video ID.

The idea is when the user visits my website such an dynamic URL is created and added to the db as a new nginx location that exists just for this user and not for others.

Or nginx doesn't fit my task and I need to use another tool?

Thanks.

I need to put on a website videos that can ba shown using a common swf player (like flowplayer).

Videos are about 3/4 minutes each (400 MB) in MPEG4/H264 compression.

I was thinking to buy a normal hosting plan package. But how much bandwidth/month do you think I need? Let' say I could have 5000 visitors per day watching each one of them an average of 1 video.

BTW: do you think it's normal that a 3/4 minutes video take 400MB in space?

Thanks!