Thankfully, there’s a way to fairly easily support everything. You can offer HTML5 video in one or more formats and fall back on Silverlight or Flash if necessary.

MediaElement.js allows you to do that with a little bit of jQuery voodoo. After including all of the required files, you can serve-up an H.264 video for Safari and iPhone/iPad users like so:

<video src="myfile.mp4" type="video/mp4" width="640" height="360"></video>
<script>
jQuery(document).ready(function($) {
$('video').mediaelementplayer();
});
</script>

There is also a way to specify more than one video type in the <video> element, if you have re-encoded it into more than one codec:

<video width="640" height="360">
<source src="myfile.mp4" type="video/mp4" >
<source src="myfile.ogg" type="video/ogg" >
<source src="myfile.webm" type="video/webm" >
</video>

You will want to check it out if you’re interested in cross-browser compatible web video.

Recently I’ve been working on a project (too be announced, shhh…) that makes heavy use of Flash. Not just straight Flash either, ActionScript-heavy, talking to service-side PHP scripts-type flash. It’s going slowly, and there is a long way to go still. I’ve got the user authentication part down, but the meat of the project is still ahead.

It’s not easy. Sure, I’m fairly new to ActionScript, but it’s not just that. Flash is a very complex, finicky beast. Developing for Flash isn’t easy, especially when you have server-side work on top of it all. ActionScript is somewhat arcane, and though it’s syntax is fairly simple, it has some real oddities to it.

I’ve gained a lot of respect for Flash developers over the past couple weeks.

JW FLV Media Player

Jeroenwijering’s player is one of the wider-known ones, and one of the first. It plays MP3s, AACs, H264 video, FLV video, and it can even stream video from YouTube. It’s very customizable too. Get it here.

1 Pixel Out Audio Player

This one is very popular among WordPress users. It’s available as a WordPress plugin or as a standalone solution. It’s very compact and simple. Get it here.

Dewplayer

Dewplayer is the “new guy.” It’s lightweight and compact. It comes in three versions with varying amounts of buttons. Get it here.

Flash developers are still celebrating, and I’m sure this is good in some ways, but…

I really don’t like the idea of Flash sites being indexable. People are going to start thinking it’s okay to build entire sites in Flash again, and believe me, we don’t want that. Though they will soon be indexable by search engines, Flash sites still

• Take forever to load as opposed to a “normal” page.
• Fail on usability. Example: Want to open a Flash site’s page in a new tab? Forget it. You can’t just middle-click the button, and the right-click menu won’t work either.
• Don’t work with screen readers, so optically challenged people will have a hard time.
• Don’t print well, or at all.
• Are more like brochures or presentations than like a website. A website has multiple points of entry, and each page has it’s own unique URL that a user can jump to. With a Flash site, you land on the main page every time, and have to navigate to the particular content. The web is not TV.

Not to mention that Flash sites are generally littered with silly animations and other visual gimmicks…and one of the big reasons people build Flash sites is so they can have those silly animations.

I think this move will encourage more Flash sites to be built again, and I really don’t want that. Don’t get me wrong, Flash is a useful technology, and is great when used sparingly, in scenarios that add to a site. I like Flash video players, Flash countdowns, etc. I don’t like seeing entire websites built in Flash. With the exception of a couple that I think are kind of cool, or if I really need a certain bit of information, I’ll often leave when I see a Flash site.

Further reading…

• Why Flash sites are… EVIL
• Discussion: Why are flash sites bad?

There have been debates over whether the ads are a good idea or not, though this isn’t really a topic you can go off comments from other people. The web is full of people who would call a single 125×125 ad “annoying” simply because it’s an ad. What do you think of them? Annoying or not? A good rule of thumb when deciding on such matters is “would it bother you if you ran into it on a site you frequent?”

Personally, I think they’re a good idea because they stay out of the way until a user requests further interaction. They’re noticeable, yet can be ignored very easily since they take up so little space on a page. It’s fun to hover over the ad to make it peel open and close too. (Not to mention you have a large ad that can be priced highly, yet takes up little space on the page.)

They’re an interesting concept, though one that’s been earning some bad rep from “Make Money Online” blogs, which I find annoying in themselves, implementing them in annoying and shoddy ways. Personally, I’d like to see this new ad format go into more serious use. They lend to cleaner pages, and they’re kind of fun.

A common annoyance with Flash “movies” (the term for Flash files) is that they have a static size. While you can scale them by hard-coding pixel values into the embed code, there’s no easy way to have a Flash movie automatically scale itself to fit its parent element.

Enter FitFlash, a JavaScript library that will allow you to make your Flash movie “fluid.” If you build full-Flash websites (*cough* Warner Brothers *cough*) then you definitely want to look into this.

FitFlash looks like a great library, though I (currently) don’t have much need for it. If you work with Flash a lot, look into FitFlash.