About inserting Flash Video

Dreamweaver gives you the following options for delivering Flash Video to your site visitors:

Progressive Download Video downloads the Flash Video (FLV) file to the site visitor’s hard disk and then plays it. Unlike traditional "download and play" methods of video delivery, however, progressive download allows the video file to start playing before the download is complete.

Streaming Video streams the Flash Video content and plays it on a web page after a short buffer period that ensures smooth playback. To enable streaming video on your web pages, you must have access to Macromedia Flash Communication Server.

You must have an encoded Flash Video (FLV) file before you can use it in Dreamweaver. You can insert video files created with two kinds of codecs (compression/decompression technologies): Sorenson Squeeze and On2.

• If you created your video with the Sorenson Squeeze codec, site visitors will need Flash Player 7 or later to play progressive download video; they will need Flash Player 6.0.79 or later to play streaming video.
• If you created your video with the On2 codec, site visitors will need Flash Player 8 or later.

After inserting a Flash Video file in a page, you can insert code in the page to detect whether the user has the correct version of the Flash Player to view the Flash Video. If they don’t have the correct version, they will be prompted to download the latest version of Flash Player. For more information, see Detecting the Flash Player version to view the Flash Video.

For more information about Flash Video, visit the Flash Video Developer Center at www.macromedia.com/go/flv_devcenter.

Related topics

• Inserting Flash Video content.
• Detecting the Flash Player version to view the Flash Video
• Editing and deleting a Flash Video component