How do you get an .flv file to play in a browser?

I have uploaded the .flv to my website but I don't know how to set it up to play when the file is accessed.

Any ideas?

 

If you convert it to an SWF you can embed it into your webpage.

If you want to play it as a FLV you will need to use an FLV player. You can edit this link to point to your FLV and it will play it.
http://www.dailymotion.com/flash/flvplayer.swf?rev=1161162913&url=http://www.yoursite.com/file.flv

 

How does youtube do it? Any idea?

Are there files SWF? I thought I had read they were using .flv files...I could be mistaken though.

 

I already answered that exact question.

The link I gave you points to http://www.dailymotion.com/flash/flvplayer.swf

That is their FLV player, they point their FLV files to that and it plays them.

 

A company with the capital of youtube uses a third-party player to play their videos?

 

Dailymotion is the top competitor to YouTube, I was using them as an example because I'm more familiar with their backend-- I programmed some of their stuff for them. If you even checked out their website before asking more questions you would have realized this.

YouTube's player is http://www.youtube.com/p.swf -- but I don't know how answering that for you is going to be of any use to you because they have a very specific algorithm to play videos

 

Re-read your post, you made it sound that YouTube pointed their videos to dailymotion.

 

Tester there is no point arguing about it.

Thanks for the info PIF

IT

 

thanks pif... taking it a step further, if you wanted to setup your own flv player on your own website, what would it take?

 

For a free player released under the Creative Commons license, check here. At it's simplest it uses a combination of a single SWF file and single javascript file to embed flv videos into your html but there are a lot of different more complex things you can do with it as well.

 

thanks kw802, that looks pretty cool!

i want to be able to use it in the manner that pif outlined, and i'd like to believe that if you handle it that way, the player would only have to be downloaded once, and it would then be re-used for multiple flv's.

if it works like that, it should cut down on bandwidth useage, and decrease the page load time(??)

 

Most FLV players do it that way but it usually isn't a big deal, the players themself are only 15-25k

 

yeah, what's 25k, when 3/4 of the people on the 'net in america use broadband? thanks for your help!

 

No problem. I implemented on my site in my vBGallery gallery software and it was pretty easy. When you unzip the download package check out the file "flvplayer.html" and you can see the HTML code to implement playing a single file. If you're using IE then make sure you specify a height & width in your flashvars string else you might end up with a 'blank' box.

Yep. At 18K for the one I linked above I'm not worried about it. I figure if somebody is surfing the net viewing videos then most likely they aren't on dial-up.

 

Does anyone when using Creative Commons license player if you can add you own screen with links after the video like youtube etc do.

thanks
Matt

 

lots of sites use .swf as a standard flash player in browsers. And it can be easily be recognized by SEs.

 

the problem with using flash is trying to find quality server software for a reasonable price.

the windows media server software is free with the o.s., and it works well, there are all kinds of controls for limiting bandwidth and selecting protocols... i don't know what these high-traffic sites are using to serve up their flash.

 

you need to encode in .swf format

 

Encode in SWF or there is a free flash FLV player for websites - try a Google for it.

 

convert it to an SWF file so that you can embed it into your webpage and can play it via your webpage.