Flash URLs

Flash is quickly becoming the streaming method of choice due to its almost universal compatability and speedy response. We support live Flash streams or on-demand files with our availability monitoring service.

Stream URL
A URL pointing directly to a live or on-demand stream hosted on a Flash streaming server usually consists of four parts. The protocol, host, application name and file name.

 rtmp://
 stream1.host.com /myapp/ flashstream.flv
rtmp:// Protocol - this tells the Flash pulgin how to connect to the server. Flash servers are usually HTTP or RTMP
stream1.host.com Host - the address of the server, either in a familiar host.domainname format or an IP address.
/myapp/ Application - A mount point of sorts that tells the server where to find the file we’re looking for
flashstream.flv File Name - the file we want to stream. For Flash, it’s almost always an .FLV file.

Some sample URL formats appear below. (none of them are active)

  • http://content.movies.mysite.com/12345/12/34/5678901234.flv
  • http://www.mysite.com/vidlibrary/video:12345678
  • rtmp://cp.mycdn.net/ondemand/fcs.test/flashtest.flv

Flash Servers
Currently, Stream Alerts can monitor Flash streams hosted on the following servers:

  • Flash Media Interactive Server
  • Flash Media Streaming Server
  • Flash Communications Server
  • Wowza Media Server

We cannot gaurantee that monitoring will work for on-demand .FLV files hosted on a web server as they do not allow true rtmp or http streaming of the Flash files. At this time, we can only monitor .FLV files and cannot monitor .SWF or other Flash types.