Playing local video files in HTML

Question

A project has various local HTML & video files for help pages. We need to be able to embed these videos in HTML pages - but because all are local files we have no server-side streaming.

Can I still just use SWFObject? Are there other well-known controls that will let us play .mp4, .swf/flv, .wmv files?

This solution is targeting HTML4 across Chrome, FF and IE (I don't know if IE6 is needed).

Answer 1

SWF can reproduce different video formats (FLV, F4V, H.264, although you need a component that handles the reproduction of the video. For simple reproduction, you don't need a streaming server.

There are different video players available, with open source, freeware or commercial license.

You can check, both Open source:

• FlowPlayer
• JW Flv player (HTML5 support)

Answer 2

The FLVPlayback component will play FLV video from the same web server the page is hosted on. You don't need a dedicated media server to do that, unless you need more advanced streaming and/or interactive features.