Today, many projects are built around real-time communication (text, voice or video) like collaboration tools, chat applications and much more.

Adobe® Flash® Media Server is probably the most widely used solution for streaming video and real-time communication. It is a stable product that has been experienced for years and used by many companies.

On the other hand, if you're looking for a free solution to stream your media, there are so few alternatives that you can rely on.

And here are 2 of them (if you know any other free and solid ones, please share):

Red5

Red5 is an open source Flash server that is written in Java and supports:

• streaming audio/video (FLV, MP3, F4V, MP4, AAC, M4A)
• recording client streams (FLV only)
• shared objects
• live stream publishing (Sorenson, VP6, h.264, MP3, AAC and more)

It has installers for OSX and Windows. Also, it can be downloaded as a zip file to be used in any OS.

Mammoth Server

Mammoth is also an open source Flash streaming server that is built with C++ and can run on Windows and *nix OSs.

It can stream all Flash codecs like h263, h264, mp3, vp6, speex, nellymoser, etc.

By using FFmpeg it has has container support for most formats: mov, flv, mkv, mp3 and more.

The server is still in alpha phase but very promising.

If you know any other free and solid alternatives, please share and we'll be happy to add them to the list.

Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), that is developed by Adobe, is a software framework for building feature-rich Flash video players and applications.

It can be integrated into custom applications using the simple API, or you can deploy the ready-to-run dynamic SWF player without compiling or writing custom scripts.

OSMF comes with standard player features such as playback controls, video navigation, buffering, and dynamic streaming.

Also, the ready-to-use plug-ins for advertising, reporting, and content delivery help extending the capabilities of the framework.

And, it has much more features like error handling, logging or buffer management that makes OSMF very promising.

xmoovStream Server is an open source http streaming server built with PHP.

It creates a layer between the web & your files to provide you control over them in many ways like:

• stream Flash videos
• force file downloads
• logging of every action
• hot link protection
• hide original file locations
• bandwidth throttling & burst loading
• & more..

xmoovStream is a centralized server which can manage different kinds of content from different urls under a single installation.

Like mentioned, it is not limited to streaming Flash videos, it can simply stream any file type including the video player itself or a thumbnail.

The server also comes with a lightweight video player & an audio player for streaming your content.

P.S. The resource is free for non-commercial website & requires a license for any other usage.

Panda is an open source solution that handles uploading, encoding & streaming videos.

All the process is completed via an elegant REST API.

Panda is designed to run in the cloud using Amazon's array of web services.

The application runs on a customised EC2 instance with everything pre-installed, including FFmpeg and an plethora of codecs.

SimpleDB is used to store all of data for video, encoding, accounts and encoding profiles. Uploaded and encoded video files are then stored on S3.

Other features of Panda:

• Everything contained within one elegant Merb application.
• Support for FLV, h264 for Flash, iPhone formats & more.
• Panda gem for painless integration with Ruby on Rails and Merb.
• Lovely little admin dashboard for managing your videos.

By default, Panda uses the JW FLV player but you can switch to any other video player easily.

iRadeo is a free online radio application that can be used to stream MP3 / WAV files.

This online radio application automatically detects and streams the files that are uploaded to a specified directory.

One great feature of iRadeo is the embedding support which lets your visitors stream your radio via a simple JavaScript code.

Features of this free online radio script:

• Streams – Supports both MP3 and WAV file formats
• Auto-Detects – Auto detect MP3 file information through the ID tags (both ID3v1 and ID3v2) and will display in the player
• Customization – Easy to customize through a single CSS file
• Embed – Easly allow listeners to embed your player on their site with just few lines of code
• Shuffle – Option to allow files to stream randomly (no file from same single artist or album will be played twice in a row)
• Limit Skips – Option to limit number of skips allowed per session.
• Auto-Play – Option automatically start streaming once page is loaded

iRadeo is coded with PHP and uses the SoundManager 2 JavaScript sound API (see WRD post) for the controls.

MP3 Player is an open source flash MP3 player which can be customized and integrated into websites easily.

It has 5 different versions that lets you only use a "play button" or a player which lets users to choose tracks from multiple files. Here are the versions:

• mini
• normal
• maxi
• multi
• js