I've taken up using FlowPlayer for my web site streaming video needs. It's light weight, extensible, easy to program to and with, packed with features and available for free. If you want just a few extra tidbits like being able to brand your players with your own logo then a few bucks is in order for the commercial version ... otherwise you're free to use the freebie in any manner you choose (including your own profitable adventures).

I've found their online documentation pretty darned good too! For example I was having trouble finding a way to set the 'wmode' setting so I could overlay a border on a player I had installed for a large commercial vendor. I approached their documentation with some trepidation as I'm very familiar with all sorts of failed attempts at explaining technological products. The FlowPlayer site made finding my solution quick and absolutely pain free ... a definite relief in today's hurry up and publish atmosphere.

The solution? Simple ... in calling the initialization function 'flowplayer' make sure the second parameter is an object as opposed to a string reflecting the url of the movie to load. In that second parameter object include any Flash embedding settings.

So instead of:

flowplayer("video_player",

"http://myvideosite.com/myvideo.flv",

clip:{ ... clip stuff here ...},

plugins:{ ... plugins stuff here ... });

One can use something like:

flowplayer("video_player",

{"url":"http://myvideosite.com/myvideo.flv", "wmode":"transparent"},

clip:{ ... clip stuff here ...},

plugins:{ ... plugins stuff here ... });

Sure, I could have just set the CSS 'border' attribute on the containing tag but that would not have solved my issue. The video which the client wanted had some empty black space around the edges and those were what needed hiding. Setting the wmode parameter for the Flash player allowed me to set up borders that were guaranteed to keep those spaces tucked safely away from the curious and discerning eyes of my customer's customers ... and things looked a lot better.

There are some other CSS related issues involved here, but I'm not going to get into them at the moment. Suffice it to say that before you rely on transparent backgrounds to allow mouse actions through to an underlying display make sure you check across the now three major browser offerings: IE, FF and Chrome.