Streaming Video vie WebDirect - good Examples?

[Wickerman]

I have a potential client who is considering using Filemaker 'WebDirect' as a means of making student films available on their website.  I'm wondering whether anyone knows of any nice examples of currently active websites that are hosting video files via Container Fields / WebDirect.

Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks in advance!

[Wim Decorte]

Uhmmm... WebDirect is a notorious performance hog as it is, not sure anyone would want to use it for video streaming at this point.  How many concurrent students would watch videos and what kind of hardware (and bandwidth) can you dedicate to this?

[Wickerman]

Thanks for the questions Wim -- It's not that a bunch of current students would be watching all at once -- more that they want their past projects to be available  for viewing in a legacy sense.  THey're thinking maybe 5-10 concurrent connections.  

Could you elaborate on or point me in the direction of materials explaining the hardware / bandwidth requirements for using WebDirect for video files?  I'm definitely out of my depth -- just dipping my toes in the water, really, trying to understand what Filemaker can do in this area!

[Wim Decorte]

There are no separate requirements for video hosting, the overall requirements are here:

http://www.filemaker.com/products/filemaker-server/server-14-specifications.html, scroll down to the webdirect part.   Keep in mind though that video streaming is going to have a much higher impact on the disk i/o and the network throughput than normal database activity, so you have to up those minimal requirements significantly.

I don't know what other activity that FMS box does or how many "normal" clients it serves.  But if you have any normal guests I would put the webdirect on a second box and do a proof-of-concept quickly to see if your setup and network holds up.