What is the difference between a media server and a video server?
Streaming media servers are used in distance education, video on demand, Internet radio, and Internet video. A streaming media server is needed in the live broadcast process. A complete live broadcast process includes collection, processing, encoding, packetization, streaming, transmission, transcoding, distribution, decoding, playback and other processes. The streaming media server is mainly responsible for collection, transmission and Play and so on. Streaming media refers to the media form that transmits audio, video and multimedia files in the network in a streaming manner. Compared with the network playback form of downloading and viewing, the typical feature of streaming media is to compress continuous audio and video information and put it on the network server, so that users can watch while downloading without waiting for the entire file to be downloaded.
Compared with general website servers, streaming media servers need to have stronger processing capabilities, and hardware devices should meet the following requirements.
one. CPU resources. The powerful SDK and sufficient CPU resources can easily handle functions such as real-time transcoding, beautification, real-time screenshots, recording, etc.; if the computer CPU frequency is too low and the processing power is too slow, we will not be able to perform other functions when the computer is accessed by multiple users. Any operation, this will cause the website to freeze and not smooth, the user experience is very poor, and many users will be lost.
two. Large capacity memory and hard disk. The production and transmission of streaming media is a black hole of system resources, and having a large capacity of memory is the prerequisite for the stable operation of the system; while streaming media files are generally large in size, a large number of media files require more storage space. Therefore, in order to ensure the normal sending of streaming media files, it is recommended that the memory should be at least 512MB, and the hard disk should be above 80G.
three. A sound card that takes up less system resources. A good sound card helps to reduce CPU usage and has a great impact on the quality of recordings (for webcasting).
Four. Enough bandwidth. Bandwidth is a very important factor to ensure smooth live broadcast without freezing. The larger the bandwidth, the more people can watch normally at the same time. Therefore, in order to ensure that users have a good live broadcast experience, it is necessary to choose the appropriate bandwidth according to the specific situation. In addition , in order to avoid downtime, it is also necessary to limit the number of connections in the streaming server.
The video server is a dedicated embedded device for compressing, storing and processing video and audio data. It is widely used in remote monitoring and video. The video server adopts compression formats such as MPEG4 or MPEG2, and compresses and codes the video data to meet the requirements of storage and transmission under the condition of meeting the technical indicators.
The video server is mainly for audio and video codec processing, so many video server products are also called video codecs.