So our mission is to have our website play a short intro movie.

Wiki Definition

“Progressive download is a term used to describe the transfer of digital media files from a server to a client, typically using the HTTP protocol when initiated from a computer. The consumer may begin playback of the media before the download is complete. The key difference between streaming media and progressive download is in how the digital media data is received and stored by the end user device that is accessing the digital media.”

Actually the “progressive download” feature implemented in most media players allows them to begin playing the file as soon as enough data received.

File formats: SWF VS. FLV

• Both are Adobe formats.
• FLV is a video container, intended to contain only audio\video
• SWF can contain animations, games, applications and videos
• SWF uses a lossless compression and is limited to a certain number of frames. Due to it is not compressed some files can be too big for use in the internet.
• Large websites like Google, Amazon are using the FLV file formats

After this short explanation, we are ready to start:

1. Create a video file in a common streaming media format (in our case: Camtasia -> SWF, mp4)
2. Upload the files to your Web Server
3. Check whether this link is working from common browsers
4. Link from you Web Pages (HTML tags or JS)

In the next posts we will talk about steps 3 and 4.

For now you can keep reading about step 1 - here