How do I embed a flash video on a web page?

Question

I'm a fairly experienced web developer, but I've never needed to work with video or audio on the web, so I'm a complete noob when it comes to flash and stuff like this. I'm creating a project in ASP.Net MVC and I don't have any Flash MX studio or anything like that. Given an AVI that I am going to convert to .flv (or something else if you guys say that isn't the right format) how do I get it to play on a web page in a nice little user friendly video player?

I just don't understand what stuff I need to download and use to make it work.

Answer 1

http://stephenjungels.com/jungels.net/articles/flash-video-howto.html

Answer 2

I use FlowPlayer, though it's been over a year since I've looked for anything better. http://flowplayer.org/

You can serve .mp4 videos with h.264 and aac instead of .flv to users who have Flash 9.0.115 or higher, which will give you slightly better quality for your bandwidth (or less bandwidth for the same quality) at the cost of higher cpu usage. Embedding the flash with wmode=window also reduces cpu usage vs wmode=opaque or transparent, at the cost of not being able to overlay html elements over the flash.

If serving from IIS, you may need to add the .flv mime type so that IIS won't generate false 404 errors (as a "security" feature). http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/rymoore/adding-flv-mime-type-in-iis-4198