Serving FLV files

[jonden]

Thanks to this site I've been able to convert some flv files to a format I can edit them with, and then back to flv to serve online on my own web server using progressive download. Plus lots of other help I've gotten here.

Here's my newbie flv question... when a page loads, that has pics, content and an flv player, the .flv file automatically gets downloaded to the browser, whether the user plays it or not. Is that "just the way it is" or is there a way to only push out the file if the user decides they want to watch the video clip. A lot of them will just go for the static content and decide they don't want to see the video clip, and I'd like to save the extra bandwidth wasted and not have the clip pushed out unless they click "play". I know I could just put a link on the page, like "click here to view a blah blah blah" and open a new page with the video player on it, but if possible, I'd rather keep it part of the main content pages. Thanks for any help or points in the right direction I should be looking in.

-- jon

[celtic_druid]

Would I guess depend on your flash container/player. Instead of loading the flv straight away it should say load a jpg cap, then start to load the flv if clicked.

[Baldrick]

what flv player flash are you using? I use http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=Flash_Video_Player and it doesn't download until I click on the play button.

[jonden]

It's one of the standard macromedia Flash 8 players, one of the web guys where I work just used Dreamweaver's "import flash video" function and it created it on its own. I don't have any of that stuff at home anyway, so it was just for testing to see how it would work, so I'll explore other players, like the one above, that was probably just a default setting or something in macromedia's stuff.

Didn't think that you should be forced to download the whole thing before you actually wanted to play it, so I figured I'd ask the smarter guys here but I know in its current form it does do exactly that, since I cleared cache, loaded the page before playing the vid (which is set not to autoplay) and I saw the whole .flv file show up in my cache.

Anyway, now that I know this doesn't need to happen, I'll look at other players and learn a little more about serving flv's and how to manipulate the other players out there. Thanks for the answers guys!