If I embed a video demonstrating my application in my home page, will it slow down the page to a considerable amount?
I tried, and checked that it takes almost 1 sec, to load the preview of the video. And as the video stream will not be downloaded until, the video is clicked, the total video do not have to get downloaded.
Is it recommended to embed a video in the home page? Or should I just keep it in a different page and put a link in the home page.
If you are embedding a flash flv video then yes, it could slow the page load down. This is because the page will need to load the flash plugin in order to get the content size, etc and render the initial frame etc.
Doesn't mean it's a bad thing though. It won't be an extreme slowdown (flash is pretty highly optimised nowadays), so instead evaluate on how it looks rather than performance unless you are trying to eke out every dreg of performance on your page load :)
Every object you add to a page can slow down the page's loading time. In general don't include anything if the load time isn't worth the added benefit of having that item.
That being said, you can optimize the page by doing some tricks so that the page renders and THEN the flash video loads. You could pre-generate a thumbnail of the flash player/video and put it on the page in the same place as the video, then on page load (jquery: $(document).ready()) use javascript to create the flash object. This may improve the perceived performance. Even better, you could defer loading the video until the user clicks a button or something.
Everything you embed will slow down the page's initial load.
You have several options: (A) embed the video in its native format (mpeg, avi, etc) or (B) convert it into Flash. A good thing about flash is that it's near universal and highly optimized, so loading the flash plugin takes little time.
The whole video needn't load for the page to finish loading (only the player), so if we're just talking about 1 video, it would make sense to embed it in the page so as to provide a better user experience.
Have a look at both of Mr. Shiny and New's points. They're valid as well.
Here one way you can have your cake and eat it too:
Don't put the flash player on the page that you will load by default....
Put in an image that looks like the player instead (it should be much lighter) .
If / when your user clicks on the player image, load in the flash player and play.