Does Flash/Flex fully load a flv before starting to play it?

If you have an flv of 20mb, does Flash fully load it before starti开发者_如何转开发ng to play it? And if not, what's the difference then with streaming video?

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No your flash player will start playing as soon as it has buffered. This is called progressive download.

If you have a flash media server you can stream the flv. This will give you certain benefits, like:

• Having multiple versions of the video at different compression rates, which can be sent to the client based on their connection speed.
• The ability to skip forward in the video without needing to download the entire video.

Also another benefit to a streaming server it that it will allow you to stream live media.