Since Flash Video is getting lots of buzz right now, here are a couple of sites that use video in a great way:

JC The Store – lovely use of short video loops that expand to play mini-movies.

Psyop – Simple site with superb video content – check out the Psyop anthem!

I never understood why flash video isn’t a lot more common. It’s true that you can get (slightly) better quality at the same bit-rate using QuickTime or Windows Media Player, but the Flash 7 player and improved sparq codecs have closed that gap. The great advantage of Flash video is seamless integration into a the UI.

Most video on the web could do with the “Grandma” test. Try and get your Granny to play a video on the web. First she gets a pop-up window asking her to select from multiple video playback technologies and bandwidths. On selecting, the video opens up in a separate application that she may or may not have installed.

Compare this to Flash video where the video plays right in the same window, regardless of the users platform. (To make the experience really slick, it’s nice to do a bandwidth test on the client, and serve the appropriate stream accordingly.)

Charlie at disc7 has setup a Flash/Search Engine test, to determine what kind of flash content will show up in Search Engines. Please support this test by linking to the test page: http://www.disc7.com/flash-movie-test/

This test came about from a discussion over at JesterXL, which was a response to
Derek Franklin’s post about the problems of getting Flash sites to show in Google.

This is one of the few remaining big problems for Flash (It’s also one of the reasons I switched from a pure flash site, to a HTML/Flash hybrid). Macromedia and Google are working on a solution, but there is still a long way to go.

One possible solution would be to use an external XML file for SWF text. A standardized naming convention would be used for the external XML URL, so Google could easily pull it from the SWF.

Check out Christian Machmeier‘s fantastic SimpleViewerAdmin. It’s a free, fully featured adminstrative backend for SimpleViewer, featuring a very usable web interface that allows you to create multiple galleries, configure gallery appearance, upload images, automatically generate thumbnails and more.

Many thanks to Christian for his work in creating this.

I just came across this method for embedding Flash in a way that supports web standards (via RedSplash). It looks like it may be a good alternative to the Flash Satay method. It validates as HTML 4.0 Strict, but not as XHTML.

Richard Wright has collected a very useful selection of AS2 classes, including classes to handle geometry, binary trees and color manipulation. Available for download here.