How does a youtube embed suppress the buffering of a video file?

Question

When a youtube video is displayed within an external site, a poster image is displayed but the actual video is not loaded until the user clicks the play button. At that point, the video file begins to buffer and the video plays.

This seems to be different than many sites, where a flash video is embedded and the video begins to buffer automatically in the background on page load, regardless of whether the video is set to autoplay or not.

How would you set up a flash video (non-youtube) to have the same behavior as youtube, where buffering does not occur at pageload? Is it an output setting that is selected during the flash video rendering process, or is it accomplished using a different method?

Answer 1

It sounds like the likely way would be to embed a video player component without actually specifying the video, and then based on user input, you delay your call to the load method until you're ready to begin buffering. Is that not what you mean?

Answer 2

As a Flash developer, you decide when to start loading or playing a video. It could be right away, on a button press, after 10 seconds, on a key press, whatever.

If you have a 3rd party video component or player it should have a flag you can set to specify this.