Playing Media Files with Flash

To play audio or video files consistently across all the browsers, you will want to use a Flash media player. Flash is the most widely supported application on the web for audio and video files.

There are a variety of Flash media players available online, some free, some not. Here is an example using the freely available JW FLV Media Player, which is the same player used by SimplePie to play podcasts.

The nice thing about the JW FLV Media Player, and other players of its ilk, is that you can relatively easily skin it to make it fit the design of your site.

There are two ways people generally embed Flash players into their XHTML: via the <embed> tag, or using Javascript. This page gives a good overview of the two methods, and the reasons for using the Javascript version.

This example is the same as the first example, but uses the Javascript SWFObject.js library to put the Flash player on the page instead of using the <embed> tag.