Flash Video automatically starts downloading (don't want them to)

Question

This question might be specific to SoThink Video Encoder v2.5, but it might not.

I've transcoded some videos [from AVI] to SWF/FLV for embedding in a web page. I used SoThink Video Encoder.

The problem is I have 9 videos on a page, and as soon as the page loads, they ALL start downloading.

I would like them each to start downloading when the play button on each video is clicked.

Is this a Flash Param I'm not aware of or not using correctly? Is this a setting in the or the tag? Or is this setting likely in the player+video that was created by the SoThink software?

Thanks! Marc

Answer 1

If you're referencing 9 SWF objects on the page, then all nine objects will start to download immediately as the HTML is loaded.

If you don't want that to happen, perhaps you could include a "thumbnail" of the video that links to it and allows the user to download it when they click on it.

Answer 2

According to this you can change the auto play settings when the SWF/FLV is generated. Since I don't have the program myself, from the looks of it you want to find the "Playback" settings and turn auto play off.

Auto play - Automatically start to play the video.

Answer 3

Hey, use JavaScript. Have an image with a play button on it, when the image is clicked, have it insert the flash video. That way, only the same image is loaded for each video until play is clicked, only then is the video inserted into the DOM.

http://robertnyman.com/2007/04/19/flashreplace-a-light-weight-javascript-to-insert-flash-movies-into-your-web-page/

here's some documentation on a class that does it

http://code.google.com/p/flashreplace/

and there's the code hosted on google.