Video File Playing Impact on LAN

Video File Playing Impact on LAN We have a video file of sie 140MB. The video file is a Windows Media Video File. A link to this video file is to be published on our intranet. When all of my business users click on the link approximately at the same time, I would like to know what exactly happens (yes, I understand that the video will play :-))
Asked by: Guest \| Views: 213

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Guest [Entry]

"Answers are yes and yes. You, really, can only play a video file if it is downloaded to your local computer in some way. If you did not setup streaming (like e.g. Youtube did), it will be firstly fully downloaded to your local computer and only then played.

Now about LAN. Throughput of standard 100Mbit duplex LAN is 10 Mb/s in each direction. If your server will be connected to router with same interface, it will only spread 1Mb/s to 10 clients and so on. Really, you can hardly play it on more than 5 machines this way.

If you have a gigabit intranet (you unlikely do, cabling and especially switches are quite expensive), you can multiply everything by 10.

The server won't be probably affected if it is not too ancient; I have a Pentium III as NAS at home, and it is more than enough to read a file from disk and send via HTTP or Samba."