Embedded Youtube player without .swf

[chrisbrown]

I'm trying to sort out whether or not this is possible, but I can't seem to find the right way to ask google and youtube docs won't give me a straight answer, so:

Does anyone know of a way to embed a video player on a webpage, and instead of a youtube-hosted video, injecting into it an avi or mpg from my own server? I have a massive archive of videos so converting to swf is not an option, and I don't know (and don't have time to learn) ActionScript so I can't roll my own.

Thanks for any thoughts.

[andrew.]

Is this what you're looking for?

[DtY]

Yes, kinda, sometimes. You can do it, but there's not yet a standard, and the user will have to have the right codecs installed to play the video.

The video player will look like whatever the video looks like on that system (on Mac OS X it's quicktime, on Windows it's WMP and on Linux it's usually GStreamer).

The HTML5 video tag looks like this (works nearly everywhere except IE)
<video src="pr6.webm" width="320" height="240" controls></video>
The width and height are optional, 'controls' will tell the browser to add the controls (if not, you have to use javascript to control it).

Here's some more detailed information about it: http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html

[edit] The article andrew. posted is the "old" way of doing it, I'm not sure if that was ever made standard, but afaik, it works in all major browsers. It's being phased out in favour of html5's <video> (which isn't a standard either, yet).

[chrisbrown]

Thanks guys but what I was looking for is a flash app(?) that could decode and play mpg/avi on the fly, but the more I think about it, the more I realize I'm doing it wrong.

I need to maximize compatibility, so HTML5 isn't an option, unfortunately.

I was hoping to use the Youtube player to provide a familiar feel to the user and because Flash is so ubiquitous, but I guess I'll have to make do with the alternatives.

Thanks anyway.