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06/19/2007
Embedding Video on Your Website Using Flash
Putting video on the web is great. Just look at how many people are going to YouTube every day. One of the biggest problems with using a big free provider is that they take your already compressed video and compress it even more. The finished video can look almost unwatchable at times. The best results happen when you can control the compression results from start to finish.
We've found that the best solution for us is to use Sorenson Squeeze to automatically encode our video and upload the compressed file into an FTP folder we've setup. One of the lesser-known features of Squeeze is the "Modify Optional Tasks" feature. Basically, you can set up a Watch Folder and set up a job, like encode to Flash SWF format. Once you've created the job you can set up an optional taks, like automatically FTPing the finished files to a server. With this set up, any videos I dump in my Watch Folder get encoded per my requirements and uploaded to my server automatically. This is cool stuff.
I really started paying attention to this as I've been setting up a new site for my trike business at UtahTrikes.com. Besides creating a local portal to the world of triking, I want to use this site as a showcase for cool video techniques. We've decided to use Flash as our primary video format because it is good quality, small file size, and the player skin gets embedded into the video file. The cool thing with that is if someone grabs the video to pay from their own site it will always play in our own branded skin. You can check out what we've done for now, but we'll be adding a lot more within the next few weeks.
Later, I'll go over the specific code of embedding a Flash object on your site and creating your own player interface.
Ashley Guy
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