To incorporate Flash video on your site, you'll need to first acquire the video, either by importing it directly from a digital camcorder or by retrieving a file in a video format, such as .avi, .mpg, .mov, or .wmv. After you have a video file, you'll need to convert it to a Flash Video file (FLV) in a process called encoding. Encoding a video compresses it using a specific algorithm or codec. FLV files encoded with Sorenson Spark can be played in Flash Player 6 and higher, whereas VP6-encoded FLV files require Flash Player 8 or higher. High-definition video must be encoded in FLV format with the H.264 codec and needs Flash Player 9 or higher.

Numerous paths to encoding FLV files are available, including the following:

When encoding, you'll need to decide which type of video output to use: streaming or progressive. The relative pros and cons are discussed in the next section.

Figure 26-1. Open the Adobe Media Encoder CS5 settings to choose the optimal delivery quality for your Flash video.

One of the first questions you'll need to address when adding Flash video to your Web page is: How will the video be delivered? The two core methods available are progressive download and streaming. Both methods are alike in that they use external video files in FLV format in conjunction with a .swf file that acts as a video player.

Progressive download begins playing as soon as the first segment has been received by the site visitor and continues to download while the video is playing. Typically, the delay is relatively short, but there is often a perceived delay. There is, however, a major plus for progressive download over streaming: you can host the files on any kind of server. Because progressive download does not require a specialized server, such as Flash Media Server (formerly Flash Communication Server), it is much less expensive to display.

Streaming video, however, can definitely be worth the cost. Video begins playing almost immediately and is more efficient for both the network in general and the viewer's computer specifically. Streaming video is also fully seekable — in other words, the video playhead can be moved anywhere to instantly view video from that point; with progressive download, you can only seek portions of the video that have already been downloaded. The truly advanced features of Web video — live feed, interactive control, video messaging, and so on — are only possible with streaming video.

The FLV object makes it as easy to add Flash video to your Web page as it is to add any other Flash movie — with even greater flexibility and control. Not only is your video added to the page, but it's accompanied by your choice of built-in controller. Flash detection code is automatically added to your page so that the user is alerted if they don't have the required version.

As noted before, your choice of delivery method for your video — either progressive download or streaming — is a key one. The importance of this choice is reflected in the Insert FLV dialog box; depending on your choice, different options appear and the steps for including a video object vary. For this reason, instructions for including an FLV object of each type are presented separately.

An FLV object actually requires a number of files to be viewed on the HTML page. In addition to the encoded video file with the .flv extension, it requires a container file either called FLVPlayer_Progressive.swf or FLVPlayer_Streaming.swf, depending on your choice of delivery method; this container file is the actual Flash movie called by the Flash Player. A file holding the video controls or skin is also used; for example, Clear_Skin_1.swf. Both of these support files are created for you by the Insert Flash Video object in the same folder as the HTML page the video is inserted in. Streaming video also requires that another generated file, main.asc, be placed in the Application folder of your Flash Media Server or Flash Communications Server. Finally, because Dreamweaver automatically writes the Flash code to Web standards and makes an express install available if the page visitor doesn't have the right version of Flash installed, you'll also need to upload the swfobject_modified.js and expressInstall.swf files found in the Scripts folder of your site root.

Publishing the files to the server for either type of Flash video delivery can be accomplished in a simplified operation. If you are publishing a progressive download video, make sure that Dreamweaver Preferences are set to prompt you to upload dependent files when your page is put or checked in. Both .swf support files and the FLV video file are considered dependent files by Dreamweaver and will be published to their correct locations when you click OK to upload dependent files.

A similar publishing ability is available for streaming Flash videos, but in a totally different way. When you select the inserted streaming video object, a custom Property inspector is displayed. In addition to permitting the modification of most Flash Video object attributes, the Property inspector also contains an Upload Media button. When you click Upload Media, the two created .swf files for the container and the skin are uploaded to the specified Web server; as noted by a Dreamweaver alert, you will be required to publish the main.asc and the FLV file to your streaming server Applications folder.

Each of the different types of Flash Video object has its own Property inspector. Both allow easy modification of most previously set attributes; only the type of delivery, progressive video or streaming, is omitted. If you need to change a movie from one delivery type to another, you'll need to delete the inserted object and re-select Insert Flash Video to choose a different type.

With a streaming Flash Video object, you have the option of altering the dimensions, the skin, the options to Auto Play or Auto Rewind, and, most important, the video source (see Figure 26-4). Because the FLV video source file is external to the video container, database-driven applications can even set the source dynamically.

Figure 26-4. Once a progressive download video object has been inserted into the page, you can alter almost all the parameters through the custom Property inspector.

RealNetworks released the first streaming media system — RealAudio — in 1995. Over the years, RealAudio has evolved into RealMedia and now supports video, images, text, Flash movies, and standard audio types such as AIFF and MP3. All these media types can be combined into a single presentation using Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL). The three primary software components of RealMedia are:

Figure 26-5. RealPlayer SP's interface enables the user to forego a Web browser completely when browsing for streaming media.

RealNetworks has led the way in cross-platform authoring and playback. Versions of RealPlayer are available for Windows, OS X, and the full range of available mobile devices. The previous version of the player is also available for Macintosh OS 9, Unix, Linux, and even OS/2. MSN TV even plays RealAudio 3.0. By contrast, QuickTime is limited to Windows and Macintosh, and Microsoft's streaming video solution is basically Windows-only.

RealNetworks has also led the way in terms of users; for years it was the only option for large-scale streaming media sites. Even now, when it faces the stiffest competition it has ever had, its market share is very high. RealPlayer is included with major browsers, as well as with Windows and Red Hat Linux.

What QuickTime refers to is widely misunderstood. Some people mix up the video format QuickTime Video with QuickTime itself. But QuickTime Video is just one of the things a QuickTime movie might contain. Sometimes the high-profile QuickTime Player is confused with QuickTime, but it is just one dependent application.

The best way to explain QuickTime is to say that it's a multimedia operating system, enabling applications such as CD-ROM titles to run on top of it and use the features it provides. These features include support for audio, video, images, 3D objects, MIDI music (including a software wavetable synthesizer), streaming video, Flash movies, and MP3 audio. After you have QuickTime 4 or greater installed on your computer, Adobe Director can access digital video, Flash can export complete QuickTime presentations, and otherwise pedestrian applications can play synthesized music.

With the inclusion of streaming video in QuickTime, Apple dressed up the QuickTime MoviePlayer with an eye-catching brushed metal look and changed its name to QuickTime Player. QuickTime movies have a .mov filename extension.

Like RealMedia, QuickTime streaming has three main software components:

Figure 26-6. The QuickTime player offers a slick interface with flexible controls..

Microsoft has released a succession of media technologies over the years in an effort to gain some sort of foothold in content creation and delivery. The history of Microsoft multimedia is an incredible story of acquisitions, rebranding, orphaned technologies, and outright copying of everybody else.

With Windows Media, however, Microsoft has gone all out, providing a solid solution with lots of partners. Still, Windows Media's greatest asset is its automatic inclusion with every Windows PC, virtually guaranteeing it a huge installed base as time goes on. Windows Media files have filename extensions of .asf or .asx. The software involved in Windows Media includes the following:

Figure 26-7. The Windows Media Player offers instant access to many media types as well as switchable skins (shown here is the sexy Raptor skin).

To keep twenty-first century TV/movie-addicted users interested in your site, you might want to spice things up by including a (low-bandwidth!) video or two. To add a video clip to your Dreamweaver Web page, follow these steps:

Figure 26-9. You can insert any video file for user-download by creating a link to it, as if it were a simple Web page.

You can gain more control over the way your video clip plays by embedding it in the Web page with the <embed> tag. Modifying the attributes of the <embed> tag enables you to modify how the video is presented. Video clips inserted this way play back in whatever players are available, just as linked video clips do.

The Assets panel includes a Movies category that holds QuickTime movies, MPEG videos, and Windows Media file types. As with all the other Assets panel categories, you must click the Refresh Site List button (the curved arrow at the bottom of the Assets panel) to initially populate the panel with all the movies in the current site. The preview pane includes a Play button for displaying the movies before they are inserted in the page.

To embed a simple video clip in a Web page, follow these steps:

Before inserting a QuickTime movie into a Web page, it's helpful to know what version of QuickTime your movie requires. Because QuickTime movies can contain a variety of track types, each with a different type of medium, some movies may play back with QuickTime 6, whereas others require QuickTime 7 or higher.

You can identify the different tracks in a QuickTime movie if you have QuickTime Pro. QuickTime Pro is Apple's premium player experience, which enables a great many features when installed. To see a video's tracks, open it in QuickTime Player and choose Window

Figure 26-12. In addition to the streaming video track, this QuickTime movie has an audio track that can be fine-tuned.

Using a Poster Movie

One of the nicest features of the QuickTime Plugin is the capability to have one movie replace itself with another. This enables you to place very lightweight (small file size), single-image poster movies into your Web pages instead of the full clips, so that the rest of the elements in your page load quickly. When the user clicks a poster movie, it replaces itself with your full movie, which begins downloading or streaming immediately. A poster movie can be a preview of the full movie that replaces it or a generic QuickTime image, as shown in the following figure. It's even possible to use poster movies to place a number of movies in a single page, enabling the user to choose which ones to view without downloading the rest, as shown in the following figure.

Creating a poster movie requires QuickTime Pro. Simply open your movie in QuickTime Player Pro and move to the frame you'd like to use as a preview. Choose File

Embed your poster movie in your Web page as described previously in this chapter and use the Plugin Property inspector's Parameters button to add the href attribute with the value set to the URL of your full movie, so that the <embed> tag looks like the following:

<embed src="my_poster_movie.mov" width="360" height="180"
       href="my_full_movie.mov">
</embed>

You can also make multiple-frame poster movies. As long as you keep the file size low, your pages will seem to load more quickly, and you provide your users more control over the way they experience them.

When incorporating RealMedia into your Web pages, you have a variety of playback options. You can set the video so that a free-floating RealPlayer is invoked, or you can specify that the video appears inline on your Web page. You can also customize the controls that appear on your Web page so that only the ones you want — at the size you want — are included.

RealMedia uses its own specialized server software called RealServer to transmit encoded video files. Rather than call this server and the digital video file directly, RealMedia uses a system of metafiles to link to the RealMedia server and file. A metafile is an ordinary text file containing the appropriate URL pointing to the RealServer and video file. The metafiles are distinguished from the media files by their filename extensions:

To create the metafile, open your favorite text editor and insert one or more lines pointing to your server and the video files. Instead of using the http:// locator seen with most URLs, RealMedia files address the RealServer with an rtsp:// (Real-Time Streaming Protocol) indicator. The contents of the file should take the following form:

rtsp://hostname/path/file

where hostname is the domain name of the server on which the RealMedia files are stored, path is the path to the file, and file is the name of the RealMedia file. For example, to display a training video, the metafile contents might look like the following:

rtsp://www.trainers.com/videos/training01.rm

You can include multiple video clips by putting each one on its own line, separated by a single return. RealMedia plays each clip in succession, and the user can skip from one clip to another.

After you've created both the encoded RealMedia file and the metafiles, you're ready to insert them into your Web page. You have two basic techniques for including RealMedia: as a link or by using the <embed> tag.

<a href="videos/howto01.ram">Demonstration</a>

Using <embed>

If, on the other hand, you'd like to make the video appear inline with the Web page's text or graphics, you use Dreamweaver's Plugin object to insert an <embed> tag. Position the pointer where you want the RealMedia to be displayed, and either choose Insert

When the Plugin object representing the RealMedia clip is selected, you can enter values for the <embed> tag in the Property inspector. The only attributes required for a RealMedia clip, as with the QuickTime Player object, are the file source and the width and height of the movie. Similarly, as you can with QuickTime Player, you can control your RealMedia movie with a healthy number of attributes. Enter attributes by clicking the Parameters button on the Plugin Property inspector and entering attributes and their values in the Parameters dialog box (shown earlier in Figure 26-9). RealMedia parameters are listed in Table 26-3.

Table 26-3. Parameters for RealMedia Movies

RealMedia G2 Parameter	Possible Values	Description
Autostart	True or false (default)	Tells RealPlayer to start playing as soon as content is available.
Console	name, _master, _unique	Determines the console name for each control in a Web page that has multiple controls. Forces controls on a page to refer to the same file by giving them all the same name. A value of _master links to all controls on a page, whereas _unique connects to no other instances.
Controls	All (default), controlpanel, imagewindow, infovolumepanel, infopanel, playbutton, positionslider, positionfield, statuspanel, statusbar, stopbutton, statusfield, volumeslider	Enables the placement of individual control panel elements in the Web page. You can use multiple controls in one attribute or multiple <embed> tags to build a custom RealMedia interface.
nolabels	True or false (default)	Suppresses the Title, Author, and Copyright labels in the Status panel. If you set nolabels to true, the actual data is still visible.

HTTP Streaming

To gain the maximum throughput of your RealVideo files, it's best to use the RealServer software. However, some Web site clients must economize and can't afford the specialized server. It is not widely known that you can use a regular World Wide Web server to stream RealVideo and other RealMedia files over HTTP.

Two prerequisites exist for HTTP streaming: Your system administrator must first correctly configure the MIME types, and you must provide multiple files to match the right user-selectable modem speeds. The proper MIME types are as follows:

• audio/x-pn-RealAudio (for .ra, .rm, or .ram files)

• audio/x-pn-RealAudio-plugin (for .rpm files)

• video/x-pn-RealVideo (for .ra, .rm, or .ram files)

• video/x-pn-RealVideo-plugin (for .rpm files)

RealServer automatically selects the right file for the user's modem connection. If you are using HTTP streaming capabilities, you should offer multiple files to accommodate the various Internet connection rates, such as 28.8K, 56K, and higher (for cable and DSL).

Besides a reduction in download speed, the other disadvantage to using HTTP streaming instead of RealServer streaming is the reduced number of simultaneous users who can be served. RealServer can handle hundreds of connections at the same time; HTTP streaming is far more limited.