What exactly are the benifits of streaming a video on the net in FLV rather than,WMV or AVI

Speed. The quality of FLV is lower than AVI, MPG or WMV. You sacrify quality and gain lower bandwidth that allow people with slow internet conection be able to watch the videos in real time or almost real time with some "buffering..." or wait in the middle.

Quote - Speed. The quality of FLV is lower than AVI, MPG or WMV. You sacrify quality and gain lower bandwidth that allow people with slow internet conection be able to watch the videos in real time or almost real time with some "buffering..." or wait in the middle.

OK thanks,And your prefered format if I may?

I prefer MPEG, MPEG2 or AVI with open codecs as XVID. The advantage of this formats is that are universal formats than run on any computer (PC, MAC, WINDOWS, LINUX, ...) or DVD player.
The quality is you that chose, better quality bigger the size.
With WMV you depend on Microsoft and you must use Windows and Media Player, you are in their hands.

Quote - I prefer MPEG, MPEG2 or AVI with open codecs as XVID. The advantage of this formats is that are universal formats than run on any computer (PC, MAC, WINDOWS, LINUX, ...) or DVD player.
The quality is you that chose, better quality bigger the size.
With WMV you depend on Microsoft and you must use Windows and Media Player, you are in their hands.

So infact wmv could not be seen on Mac for example.
Would MP 4 be an option for streaming on line at 640x480 (4.3).
That would then be visible in Windows and Mac as a QTime movie I Think,in.with the windows version plating on WMV-correct me if Im wrong.

Attached Link: Did YouTube Cut the Gordian Knot of Video Codecs?

I do not believe that this is true. VLC available on Mac as well as Windows and Linux plays wmv. as doe the Mac only Flip4Mac plugin. Those are two I foind in 30 seconds of searching.

FLV is pretty widespread amongst the video sights and almost everyone has Flash installed.  YouTube is now experimenting with H264 IIRC. I think the media college link I gave you some time back, provided a good basic overview. If you need more detailed info, I'd find a media oriented site with an active forum. Not to disparage the font of wisdom here, but you're getting into a fairly specialized subject.

I assume you're going with http streaming rather than with hosting. If it were me, I would set up a server (There are a few like Xerver that are a snap to setup) or you can use IIS or Apache if you're more ambitious. Set up some sample pages, go hit your server over the inetrnet and see how the various configurations respond. It may sound likre overkill but if you're intent on doing something beyond just the usual upload it to YouTube, if you want your own custom website then I'd say it's worth it.  The link muses on youtube's choice of Flash and the tradeoffs.

Quote - "With WMV you depend on Microsoft and you must use Windows and Media Player, you are in their hands." 

I do not believe that this is true. VLC available on Mac as well as Windows and Linux plays wmv. as doe the Mac only Flip4Mac plugin. Those are two I foind in 30 seconds of searching.

FLV is pretty widespread amongst the video sights and almost everyone has Flash installed.  YouTube is now experimenting with H264 IIRC. I think the media college link I gave you some time back, provided a good basic overview. If you need more detailed info, I'd find a media oriented site with an active forum. Not to disparage the font of wisdom here, but you're getting into a fairly specialized subject.

I assume you're going with http streaming rather than with hosting. If it were me, I would set up a server (There are a few like Xerver that are a snap to setup) or you can use IIS or Apache if you're more ambitious. Set up some sample pages, go hit your server over the inetrnet and see how the various configurations respond. It may sound likre overkill but if you're intent on doing something beyond just the usual upload it to YouTube, if you want your own custom website then I'd say it's worth it.  The link muses on youtube's choice of Flash and the tradeoffs.

Actually To begin with Ill be useing a hosting service and later a server from home when the larger version of my site is ready,but good info anyway.
VlC,is extreamly good(it even plays my old 78s) but as this site is only for using as a place where i can make a pitch to selected possible clients Ill have to use some thing a little better known and more commonley used

If it were a very select group + I wanted to impress them, I'd pop for Video CD'S OR Mini DVD'S. No downloading or format hassles and they have a physical copy of your portfolio, plus you get to show the full quality of your work at  a [retty much guaranteed level of hardware playback performance. 

I wrote a narrative recently that was used in that way for a video slideshow. A local company did the filming added music and duped the discs, but frankly, I think other than duplicating a few hundred discs, we could have done the production ourselves with off the shell tools. We may repourpose the footage in part or whole at lower resolution on one of the media sites or a dedicated website. Once you have it, you can slice and dice it as you choose.

I'm by NO means an expert or even a learned novice on this but in a few minutes, usinf the instructions from mediacollege I was able to get an embedded and downloadable wmv page working on my Xerver local site in iE, Opera and Firefox.

Remember unless you're paying for a streaming server whether hosted or local, you're not getting true streaming.

 One can view .wmv on a Mac provided they've installed the proper codec, Flip4Mac in my case. But as far as preferred file format, I vote for MPEG4 (aka H.264), which is what BluRay is encoded with. It does not stream per se, but it's platform independent, the files are small (for their screen resolution) and there's NO artifacts. All my work is MPEG4.

H254 is indeed catching on. Abobe will fight tooth and nail to keep Flash the standard and Mozilla and some of the open source folks want Ogg/Theora for HTML5. Tally up what most of the pr0n sites are using and it's a safe bet that it's got 90%+ market penetration - slightly less in religious institutions, slightly more in Congress.