Tazio,

>I'm currently grappling with these kind of issues of embedding and streaming formats. Why do you think Flash is a pain to work with?<

A couple of reasons; you can't just drop an .FLV file into a page, you've got to have some method of detecting Flash - JavaScript or the SWFObject - and then you need a container in the form of an SWF file so that the user has transport controls.

There are a number of web developer tools that can help, Dreamweaver for example can create its own JavaScript and a container, but there's still one problem as I see it, that is that the file plays back the moment the page loads. If you put two, three or four clips on a page, the browser will attempt to play them all together.

What we ended up doing, was making our own SWF containers. We put a thumbnail of the clip on the first frame of the SWF along with a stop command. The first frame also contains a button which on release sends the user to the second frame, and there we embedded the controls and link to the FLV.

So essentially instead of just encoding a clip, we ended up encoding, writing our own SWF file (for each clip) together with the JavaScript validation and page code needed in case people didn't have flash installed.

You can see that in action here:

We didn't edit that video by-the-way, before any of you critics get started. ;-)

>We've been using wmv quite successfully with linked videos but embedding can get hairy, and we've been adked to provide swf?<

At this point I'd rather embed SWF (ie FLV) than Windows Media or QuickTime and the quality is great.

Thanks Stuart,

great info, (shame about the band). Flash 8 seems to be the best quality currently. Amazing how so much of our work is converging with the IT industry these days - and creating new opportunities!

Regards,

Tazio (Phil)

>As David alludes to, the problem with the web is that everyone else's site is just >one >click away. If someone comes to my site to view my video, I don't want them >to have >to go to the DviX site first, download a player and/or CODEC and then >come back. >They'll either get fed up or sidetracked viewing the clips on the DivX >site.

Actually you can stream off the DivX site without leaving your own site just like you can from Youtube. The first time you will be prompted to install both a web player and the DivX codec, but this happens without taking the visiter from your web site.

>PS. I was wrong about the MediaBox, I've just tried it and thanks to a recent update it >does play DivX files.

Actually, most of these types of boxes use mpeg decoders that will decode Xvid, DivX and various flavors of mp4. My old Philips 642 will play back the video from a wmv file just fine but not the audio. Basically it is because on that generation they never bothered to license the Microsoft audio codec. Almost all of them do now. Most current mp4 compatible hardware players will play back Xvid, DivX, and WMV just fine although they won't always use the trademarked names of DivX or WMV in their literature (probably to avoid paying licensing fees).

By the way, if you do an eBay search for "DivX players", "MP4 players", "Xvid players" or "WMV players", you'll find that there are quite a few hardware boxes these days that will play back these files from a hard drive, thumbdrive or over a network. Most don't use the terms "DivX" or "WMV" in their descriptions though they'll come up from a search of those terms. Quite a few will do HD resolutions and the more advanced ones are just dedicated Linux boxes.