Step 3: Get Creative: Customize How You Play Video on Your Site

Now that you've decided how you will encode and deliver your video, you're ready for the creative part: Building your Flash Video player for your website. This isn't too hard, as Flash MX Professional 2004 has prebuilt media components that you can simply drag to the Stage and configure in a dialog box. And, on top of that, you can now even use a handy Dreamweaver extension (included in the Macromedia Video Kit) to put your FLV in your page—without even opening Flash.

However, many of you are going to want to do much more. For example, you may want to create custom video players that integrate with your site. You may also want to synch the appearance of other graphics with your video, make your video play borderless within a scene, or overlay your video with interactive hotspots. To get these more customized effects, you need Flash MX Professional 2004.

If You Are a Flash User…

Flash MX Professional 2004 users get the best of both worlds when creating Flash files that host Flash Video. You can use the Flash media components to quickly get video into a Flash movie, then you just publish the SWF and the FLV files on your website. Again, see "Creating and Playing Flash Video Files Through Progressive Download" to get the detailed steps.

If you want to start creating more complex video presentations, check out the Flash Video Templates, which you can download and modify for your own design and usage. The templates include model sites for playing personal video, corporate video presentation, a live video webcast, and more.

Figure 4. Corporate spokesperson template, in which supporting graphics synchronize with video cue points and display seamlessly next to the video

Finally, if you're a real expert with Flash, we've provided the source code (FLA) and documentation for our Flash Video Gallery application on macromedia.com.

If You Are a Dreamweaver User…

Some folks who have Macromedia Dreamweaver (or even Macromedia Studio MX 2004) may not be that familiar with Flash, but want to get started quickly (and learn Flash later). The Macromedia Video Kit gives Dreamweaver users an easy way to place Flash Video in a web page, without ever opening Flash.

The Macromedia Video Kit includes two very important components: the Flash Video extension for Dreamweaver MX 2004, and that special version of Sorenson Squeeze 4.0 that I mentioned earlier. With the kit, you can convert and encode any video on your computer to FLV using Sorenson Squeeze. Then, with the extension, you can place that video on your HTML page. The extension takes care of building and configuring the video player for you.

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