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You actually need to have created some .swf version of the video.

You, or somebody else? I've heard good things about Flowplayer, if you and your viewers happen to live in a country without MPEG-4 software patents.

Stupid comment, get an education. If you want to create your own Flash player you can do that. It is OPEN. Stop drinking the Apple Kool Aid without question.

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

http://flowplayer.org/

http://www.swift-tools.net/Flash/

http://www.swftools.com/tools-category.php?cat=968

There are also dozens of tools that create Flash apps so you are not restricted to Adobe's tools either.

The main problem is that historically, Flash developers have been extremely bad at implementing graceful degradation, or even content description targetted specifically at users who do not have the capabilities (physical or technical) to comply with a specific technology.

Javascript, over the years, has become extremely good at graceful degradation. Toolkits such as JQuery really stress the fact that Javascript should be used to augment a user's experience, without making support for said toolkit or language a requirement.

A common example of this are menus which show will display a submenu when hovered, but still work as a proper HTML link if clicked (intentionally or because the user's browser is unable to display the submenu). I have seen quite a few websites where the navigation relied extensively on Flash, and there was no way to browse anything else than the index if Flash was unavailable.

I think everyone realises that Flash is a dying technology. Its proprietary nature, lack of openness, CPU-hungry cycles and history of poor design have made it the black sheep of webdesign; the only reason it still is popular is because of YouTube. As a few in here have said, Joe Bloggs doesn't care about what technology powers the fancy and shiny flashing buttons on the interwebs. So, whether it's Flash or something else, they'll adopt anything as long as it just works. We just need to wait for websites to stop providing it.

Unless we're talking about very fancy vector drawing, there rarely is anything about content disposition in Flash that provides an advantage over HTML/Javascript. A few examples of this are LivePipe and JQuery Tools. Most of these are available through Content Delivery Networks, which drastically reduces load times.

Didn't you know that codecs can come in separate binaries, and one for H.264 is already included in most OS's?

"Most operating systems" by what count? As of the first quarter of 2010, two-thirds of desktop PCs still run Windows XP, and unlike more recent versions of Mac OS X and Windows, Windows XP does not come with an H.264 decoder.

Didn't you know that mozilla *already* interfaces with proprietary binary blobs, and in fact one of them can play back H.264?

So how hard would it be to write a Greasemonkey script to turn <video> elements referencing H.264 video into <object> elements using Flowplayer?

I stumbled on this gem a week or two back and it seems to work well. http://flowplayer.org/ It's a GPL3 replacement for flash player on websites. Never heard of it till last week.

Very cool! Too bad they don't transcode it to flash and use a free flash player on top. I hate downloading large video...

(I'm just complaining in hopes the maintainer reads this and does exactly that)

There's also FlowPlayer, though you'll need to host it somewhere.

Anyone who thinks having videos as flvs will keep the majority of people from "stealing" content clearly hasn't done a search for "save flv" on google. It's a pity no-one out there coded up an open source flash player though. It would save lots of time and trouble.