Hi all,
As I understand it Firefox does not support H.264 encoded video using the tag. I've been told that Flash will quite happily handle such content however I have no experience with Flash nor do I have access to Adobe Creative Suite. I'm developing primarily for Firefox users and recoding our video content to OGG would not be practical. What are my options?
You can develop a very simple app with Adobe Flex using their free SDK. Flex is much easier for programmers than Flash IDE anyways. No need for CS.
http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/
There are free IDE's too, for example FlashDevelop:
You're probably best off using a component made for the purpose. JWPlayer is very popular, though I don't personally have experience with it. You just embed the player in your page and pass in the videos you want played with JavaScript, so no Flash development tools or skills are needed.
flash really plays h.264 vids in FF so you can develop your own player (it will take about one page of code if you need just a player) or use OSMF (opensource media framework), the compiler is free at opensource.adobe.com and above-mentioned FlashDevelop is a really cool actionscript editor imho.
flowplayer.org/ is google top result for 'free web video player' btw '