Flash video in a website

While researching about displaying video in web pages I came upon a good [free] solution.

It uses:
Free and open source flash based video player called FlowPlayer.
Their website: http://flowplayer.sourceforge.net/

To encode the videos into the flv video format I used a free tool called Riva FLV Encoder.
Their website: http://rivavx.de/?encoder

Why a flash player as apposed to quicktime/windows media player/real player? A lot more people have Adobe Flash installed and it’s just a generally more foolproof method of serving videos on the web (aka. the extremely popular youtube.com is flash based).

Here is an example of the html required:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="videos/FlowPlayer.swf" width="320" height="263" id="FlowPlayer">
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
<param name="movie" value="videos/FlowPlayer.swf" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="scale" value="noScale" />
<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
<param name="flashvars" value="config={videoFile: 'glider.flv'}" />
</object>

Where flider.flv is the video file that was encoded with the Riva encoder. The example also stores all of the files in a sub directory called “videos”.