This past week I was playing with the Plex Media Server. It uses HTTP Live Streaming (HTML5). The app creates an .m3u8 playlist file, then uses ffmpeg to transcode to h264 baseline in a mpeg2-TS container in (something like) 5 second 'chunks' per file to a temp directory. The transcoded chunk files are then streamed to the client with a player that knows how to consume the .m3u8 playlist file.
The advantage of this, is the player can be native to the OS and use the appropriate HW accel when rendering. Also jwplayer has recently added support for it.
Here's the draft for the http live streaming:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pantos ... reaming-07HTTP Live Streaming is the upcoming method.