I spent a bit of time yesterday working through a few tutorials at gotoAndLearn.com building a flash video player.

My previous attempts with encoding quicktime for flash with Flash 8 Video Encoder had resulted in flash files larger and of poorer quality than the original. This time I just used the flash export in Quicktime Player pro with better results, I don’t know enough about the various parameters to use Flash 8 Video Encoder.app effectively. The QT exported files sometime come out a bit bigger and sometimes smaller but not as much bigger as my efforts with the Flash Video Encoder. I guess I still need some lessons in encoding video…

I then altered the video player a bit so that it will not load the flash movie until clicked and loads a jpg preview, the locations of both movie and preview can be passed to the player making it fairly simple to use the player for multiple files in a blog.

I’ve not decided if I should go for quicktime or flash for Sandaig Television, but it is nice to have options.

The above examples are sections of a movie created by my primary six class last session.

We can even give you a snippit to embed the video in your own blog just like YouTube:

embed<object width="448" height="372"><param name="movie" value="http://homepage.mac.com/sandaig/.Movies/sandaig_tv/sandaig_tv2.swf?j=Glencoe_06_5.jpg&v=glencoe/Glencoe_06_5.flv" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" /><param name="quality" value="high" /></object>

I think.