Flash video without YouTube
I’ve mentioned recently using the JW Flash Media Player and the associated Wordpress plugin to enable easy embedding of Flash videos in Wordpress.
Our corporate network is - ahem - somewhat antiquated, and I was having problems getting the JW Flash Media Player to work properly on our machines. Turns out that we’re on and older version of Flash (7, rather than 8 or 9) and this seemed to be the root of the problem.
After a bit of searching, I found the Mini Flash Video Player by RichNetApps. This is a really simple, slightly bare-bones video player which works nicely even with ancient Flash versions.
Just drop the player files into your web directory, and add the code to your HTML. Here’s mine as an example:
<div class="flvPlayer">
<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" width="320" height="260" id="player" align="middle">
<param name="movie" value="/wp-content/miniflvplayer/player.swf?file=/uploaded/video.flv&aplay=false&autorew=false&title=Video+Title" />
<param name="menu" value="true" /><param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" />
<embed src="/wp-content/miniflvplayer/player.swf?file=/uploaded/video.flv&aplay=false&autorew=false&title=Video+Title" menu="true" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="320" height="260" name="player" align="middle" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />
</object>
</div>
For small projects, there’s a lot to be said for self-hosting the video - aside from the Flash version quirks of our network, it’s not the headache I expected it to be.
