Flash (H.264) vs WMV streaming

[kameel]

Hi All,
I want to video stream a live event on my website,
I found a service provider, that offered me two choices:

to stream a Flash H2.64 video or a WMV video.

I don't know which is better.

Which gives a higher quality, which is lighter (that can help have more users connected), which is more compatable?)
Which perform better on different connections (high and low bandwidth)

I will appreciate any help,

thanks

[guns1inger]

H264 will generally give you better quality at the same bitrate, or the same quality at a lower bitrate. It also has the advantage that flash is available and more easily playable across a variety of platforms. WMV can be more troublesome on Linux and Mac boxes.

That said, live streaming with WMV had been around a long time now and is a mature pipeline. Live streaming via flash is newer, and so may have more setup issues. You also need more computing power to encode to H264 than WMV (assuming standard mpeg-4 WMV)