Streaming video for the first time

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Streaming video for the first time

faith580

4:22 pm on Aug 25, 2008 (gmt 0)

my church wants streaming video on their site. this is my first time doing this. they have provided a 5 mb wmv file to me. i searched on how to convert wmv to flash. so ill buy a converter...but whats the next step?

do i need to contact the hosting company to do anything special?
how do i embed the video in the site and link it properly?

things i know about their hosting account
- Unix, share enviroment
- tarabyte transfer
- 40 gb of space

any help would be great :)

webastronaut

3:25 am on Aug 26, 2008 (gmt 0)

Maybe just create a Youtube account and you can just upload for them to convert to Flash. You can link the videos within the church web pages.

faith580

1:09 pm on Aug 26, 2008 (gmt 0)

yeah that was my first choice but the church really wants streaming....they want this welcome video to play as soon as the page loads.

i tried playing with it last night. i downloaded a trial version of flash. and imported the video and let flash do its thing. so i have a .flv file and two .swf. i found some code on the internet on how to embed it ....i change somethings so it can work on my site....
but its not working.

this is the code i found

i think im pretty close. is there anyway i can post my link or send it to someone to see if they can see what im doing wrong?

rocknbil

6:26 pm on Aug 26, 2008 (gmt 0)

The embed element you are using is specific to NN/FF (mozilla). Normally, the way Flash is done is you have an <object> element to display in IE with parameters with the embed tag nested inside that for Moz browsers. It's invalid code, but is what Flash generates on publish.

I wont provide sample code because this is really not the best approach. The best is to use the open source library SWFObject. Google for it and follow the examples. It's really easy to set up. What it does is places a static image of the Flash as a placeholder:

Then when it loads, it replaces the content of video with the Flash. Best of both worlds, it provides accessible content to non-Javascript or Flash enabled browsers.

And it's valid code.

The other problem you might face:

flvplayer.swf

If this is truly a streaming flash player, it will load the .flv externally, buffer it, and begin to play once the buffer is filled. If the entire video is loaded before playing, it's not really streaming. (Google for "NetConnection()" for samples.) But let's get it playing first before deciding if it's streaming or not.