I've never worked with a Flash streaming server before, so forgive my
ignorance. I'm a web/Flash developer, not an IT guy...

We're working on a site in which the flv's are called from a Flash streaming
server, while the html and "parent" swfs live on a separate http server. The
flv's are called using the FLVplayback component, using an rtmp address in the
ContentPath parameter. There are a lto of videos, but they're pretty small
(320x240), and none of them are longer than about 20 seconds.

The problem is that the flvs show up fine, in terms of showing the video and
playing the audio, but they're loading VERY slowly (the screen appears black
for several seconds before they start). I tried calling them locally from the
server that the rest of the content is on, which means they're being played as
progressive videos, and they load very quickly that way.

That would be a solution, except that this is a very high traffic site, and
I'm afraid that if hundreds of simultaneous viewers try to look at the videos
at once the bandwidth will clog right up. Of course, if streaming was working
the way it's supposed to, they should actually play faster than they do
progressively (or so I understand), so that makes me think that there's
something about how they're being called that's wrong.

Anyone have any ideas?