Converting to flash video & embedding

Video credit - European Space Agency

There are plenty of good video hosting companies that will convert your video and host it on their servers after having converted it to Flash Video. www.youtube.com offers this service of course.


These companies offer ease of use and take the strain on bandwidth usage when your video is being played. Just upload your video, copy the code, and paste in to your website - lovely ! Many of the embedded videos on my site use this method to display videos . The benefits for me are ease of use and and as mentioned ,zero bandwith used on my server when these videos are played....

BUT....

....Sometimes it's desirable to host a video on a server of your choosing and maintain full control over how it looks and is displayed.

The video above is hosted on a free googlepages account I set up (to preserve bandwidth of my own server!) and embedded on here. It was created using free software for which I had a lot of control over the quality settings and hence the videos final appearance - you just don't get that level of control with the video hosting companies.

Here are the steps I took

Step1
I saved my movie maker project in an AVI format

Step 2
I used Riva FLV Encoder to convert the avi video to a flash video (flv)



Step 3
I uploaded the flv video file to my googlepages account

Step 4
I visited freevideocoding.com to set my display paramters (same as those I created in RIVA) and generate the required html code

Step 5
I pasted that code in the top of this post,

Step 6
That's it! The video displays at the top of this post for which I had much control.

A few more things to consider !

If you right click on the above player you will notice that it was created and generously shared by jeroenwijering.com. For this player to work it is nescessary to upload both an swf file and flash video to a server - normally in the same directory . In the steps above however , no mention was made of the swf file. The reason for this is that freevideocoding.com actually stores the swf file on their server which is referenced in the HTML code the site generates. This is not a problem but it does remove a layer of control when embedding the video. What if their site went down ?

For full control I would suggest downloadin the swf file from www.jeroenwijering.com/ and hosting it yourself .

This post here looks at embedding another free flash player called "flow player"