re: Live Smooth Streaming – Design Thoughts

samzhang — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 06:59:54 GMT

Windows Media Services HTTP live streaming is also a push model. Most of the existing live streaming protocols are push models from server to client. Just to be clear, the push/pull here is only for the media data transfer part. It's not the same thing as who initiates the first request in which case any unicast protocol is a pull model because client initiates the first request.

The typical buffer size varies depending on the server type and configuration. In general, if you don't care much about end-to-end latency, you can have a bigger server side buffer for fast start. Small server side buffer would mean shorter end-to-end latency but longer startup latency. It's a trade off.