Showcasing your videos on your website can be done as a Gallery in much the same way as images.

Its never a good idea to have more then one movie per page if you want it to download and play quickly.

A Gallery allows you to show a thumbnail of a representative frame from your movie with a caption and brief description for both your viewers and the search engine spiders.

Preparing The Media

The images for the examples on this page were created in Keynote, exported as 640 px x 480 px JPEGs and imported to iPhoto as an album.

This album was converted to a slideshow and the duration is controlled by the length of the sound track.

It was then Exported using:

File/Export/Slideshow/ComputerSettings/CustomExport.

... to my desktop.

File Conversion

Each .mov file was convert to .swf in two different sizes - 640 x 480 px and 1064 x 800 px - using Video2SWF, the resulting files where dropped into a folder and upload to my server.

Because the SWF files are loaded into the same folder, the larger version was renamed MovieNameL.swf to distinguish it from MovieName.swf, so that both versions could exist in the same folder.

A new page on this site was created for each movie. The page is excluded from the navigation menu.

The movie was embedded in the page by pasting the code below into an HTML Snippet box and the caption made to perform as an internal hyperlink to this page, As before, a back button returns you to this page.

The thumbnail image of each movie is set as an external hyperlink to open in a new browser window using the format -  http://www.website.com/FolderName/MovieNameL.swf  - and the viewer returns to this page by closing this window.   

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000"

codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"

width="620" height="480"

id="Movie Name">

<param name="movie" 

value="http://www.website.com/FolderName/FileName.swf" />

<param name="quality" value="high" />

<param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" />

<embed src="http://www.website.com/FolderName/FileName.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff"

width="620" height="480"

name="Movie Name" align="" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"

pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">

</embed>

</object>

The variables are marked in Blue.

If you are publishing to MobileMe you can upload the SWF file and any player assets required to one of the media folders such as “Movies”. The URL will take the form:

http://homepage.mac.com/username/.Movie/MovieName.swf

Note the . before the folder name “movie”.

Alternatively you can upload a folder with your SWF file to ......

Finder/Go/iDisk/My iDisk/Web/Sites by drag and drop and use the URL format.....

http://web.me.com/username/FolderName/FileName.swf

For examples of the difference between QuickTime and Flash:

QuickTime Movie Page                                Flash Movie Page

iWeb for Musicians E Book

Next Page