Some sites hosting embed-able videos offer only a limited choice of thumbnails. So...

I was wondering if it's possible to create a small swf, perhaps hosted on your own web space, which would have as a starting frame any image you chose (and maybe even a mouse-over) which, when clicked, would play an embedded movie which was actually hosted elsewhere.

Anybody know if that's possible...? How would I approach that? (I used to be a dab hand with Flash 5, but it's moved on a bit since then)

The potential for interactivity would be enormous. For instance a user could choose a video and then select a particular version.

Cheers!

Hi Karel, I would suggest to always put your FLVs in a SWF file if meant for typical websites, using the progressive download method. First you get better control over the skin. Second, if you have multiple movies you can use the same container for them all. This also goes for audio files as well. Third you can add interactivity and navigation to the SWF file. You can also import a video hosted on another server. Its acutally a very powerful way to present multimedia on websites.

Best, Ken

Cheers Ken!

So if I get my head around Flash CS4 (or will CS3 do it?) all the tools are in there?

I asked because I wondered if the flv movie had to be part of the swf file. So an swf file could, for example, link to both HD and HQ streams of the same uploaded movie on YTube (thus allowing users to choose which is suitable) and I also can choose a better thumbnail than the 3 random ones Ytube supplies...

Cool.

Hi Karel, Even Flash CS2 has everything you need.

OK, there is embedding the movie in the SWF and there is linking to a FLV and doing the progressive download method. You almost never want to permanently embed the FLV, since that way the user has to preload the movie and could be waiting quite a bit for a large FLV.

I'm not sure if you can play YouTube movies inside a SWF. I am pretty sure that you need to know the URL of the FLV file, and this is not available, AFAIK, with YouTube. Usually one hosts FLVs on a Flash streaming server or equivalent. You may want to explore this as it has some advantages or at least put the FLVs on a fast server with lots of bandwidth.

For YouTube videos, I think what you may be able to do is have typical HTML links open up a popup browser window configured to be the size of the YouTube video. In DW it is a behavior.

Good luck!

Cheers! I'll post questions as they arise, though Adobe have a good tech forum too.