I needed to broadcast a live lecture over the weekend, so I experimented with Red5. I took the default AMI and send 2 streams from FMLE. I never listened to the audio, but I ran the video for a few hours and everything seemed fine. Friday night I started the live broadcast. I noticed that the audio was "glitchy" (momentary drops and digital artifacts). People were still able to listen to the lecture though. The bigger problem is that after an hour, the entire feed started pausing and picking up a few seconds later. These pauses started getting longer and longer until the feed was well over a minute or more behind live. I had two other user provide feedback about the same problems.

After the Friday night broadcast, I took a default Wowza image and configured the web player to use it. I broadcasted for 2 2-hour sessions and had no problems. The audio was perfect and the stream never paused.

Both servers were built on m1.small instances and there was no extra configuration of the software. My broadcast set up was exactly the same. In addition, with Wowza, I was able to broadcast to my iPhone.

I'm a big fan of open source projects, but I don't think Red5 is ready for prime time.

I was eager to begin using my EC2 instance with a pre-configured Red5 RTMS on it, so that I could use VideoWhisper on my website to host realtime audio/video conferencing.

After starting the instance and ordering the Red5, the Red5 did indeed show up rather quickly and was 'working'.

However the next step should have been very easy, but through several dats of effort on my part, using email, webforms, and telephone calls, I was never able to get it done:

I needed to place the script that I received from VideoWhisper on the Red5 in a particular folder location and then restart it.

But there seems to be no known way to bring in a file from outside the server and use it. The FTP function does not work, and there is no cpanel or file manager application. How hard could that be?

During the 4 days my server was 'running' with nobody connected to it and nothing configured on it, it managed to charge me 2.99 in useage fees. That was with not a single connection made to it and nothing 'running'. SO I extrapolated that out to a monthly predicted bill of $24.00... for a product that is actually freeware, and does not work.

Obviously, I cancelled the order and closed my EC2 account. Throughout the process of this 4 days I opened manyhelp tickets, and got many form letters, followed by other form letters that started out with the phrase "unfortunately, we were unable to solve your problem..."

So they are unable to solve the problem of not being able to take a simple vendor-provided script and putting it on the RED5 in a specific folder and restarting it.

Do not get this product... it will ruin your day.

I installed this thinking it will a lot better than installing from scratch but i discovered that it was always giving problems from ground up. Am back to Wowza and FMS!!

It's complicated to set up Red5 on your own server - this pre-installed image takes all that hassle away.

Once I'd started the instance I was able to use the Red5 instance to start recording video immediately.

Long term, I think it's going to make more sense to actually build our own install otherwise we're continuing to pay monthly for the privilege, but in order to get us up and running to build our prototype and probably for the first few months this is working perfectly well.