Software/hardware to build video streaming server? [closed]

Sounds like chopper3 has this area pretty well covered, by for my $0.02:

We stream on-demand lectures that run for about 12 hours each (broken up into one-hour blocks). We use Flash Media Server (but with a streaming-only license) from Adobe, and a custom-built app to display it in the presentation in the users browser (and tie slides/video/audio together).

We run the server on a Dual Quad Core Xeon 2.4Ghz with 4Gb of ram and we've never run into any scaling issues, except for running out of RAM on occasion (FMS is very ram hungry). We run a link with 2mb uplink, but our media is of very low quality (320x240, high compression, mono audio). We've never had any complaints. We also use the RMTPE protocol, which is encrypted and has an additional CPU overhead.

We can up-scale our link with a call to our ISP and it's done within a few minutes, so if it's ever under huge demand we can speed it up for a few hours, then drop it back again to save money.

FMS has the ability to stream from live capture cards. It comes with a sample application that streams from your webcam, but it would not be difficult to have it stream from an alternate live source (capture card, etc).

Hope this sheds some light!

For video streaming, Microsoft have an excellent solution with Silverlight for the client side (or plain H.264), and IIS Smooth Streaming for the server side that allows automatic and transparent quality adjustment (and more). It's standard HTTP, so cacheable with any HTTP Proxy

Here is a showcase: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/iis-smooth-streaming/demo/

IIS Media Pack: http://www.iis.net/media

It's really, as I know, one of the best solution for video streaming...