Red5 is an open source flash server, see http://osflash.org/red5. You may want to look at the 'Is Red5 legal?' section of the FAQ. Red5 can stream mp3 and flv. In a future release mp4 streaming support is envisaged.

Here's how you get Red5 going for video streaming.

• Step 1: Install Red5, and run Red5.
• Step 2: To test the install, locate the samples directory, and move it to a web server, and run them from a webserver.
• Step 3: Locate the 'webapps' directory, which corresponds to the server root. In the 'oflademo' application, there's a number of files in the 'streams' directory. Here's how you stream.
  • (a) Get the 'player.fla' from the samples directory. Open in the flash authoring application, edit the action script, and change the flv file to one that exists in oflademo/streams. Publish, and run: You should be seeing the stream.
  • (b) Alternatively, you can use flash player, such as jw mediaplayer. You need to make sure that you omit the 'streams' directory from the path, i.e. the file located in red5/webapps/oflaDemo/streams/IronMan.flv has the url rtmp://localhost/oflaDemo/IronMan.flv
• Note that it's fine to create subdirectories in 'oflademo/streams', e.g. 'oflademo/streams/more', which you get via 'rtmp://localhost/oflaDemo/more/file.flv'

Recipe for jw mediaplayer: for v4.1, flashvars should be set to

file=IronMan.flv&streamer=rtmp://localhost/oflaDemo

while for v3.16 you need

rtmp://localhost/oflaDemo/IronMan.flv

(Thanks to VirtPresenter team from U Osnabrueck for discussion!)