It’s taken quite a few hours of trial and error and things not working – but in the end it’s not too complicated. In essence getting your video onto a webpage is a two part process – encode into FLV format then wrap this FLV in a SWF viewer and embed in your webpage. The first part is best achieved ffmpegX with a helping hand from MPEG Streamclip if your source is a DVD VOB file. The second part requires finding a Flash player – more elusive than I had anticipated – and writing a wee bit of HTML code into your webpage.

Step one: prepare FLV video stream

Use ffmpegX. Its a really great tool but currently falls over with some QuickTime movies when the virtual stack of audio/video is the wrong way round – an “invert mapping issue”. I came across this problem when changing the soundtrack of an existing movie file. The work-around is documented here

What if the source material is on a DVD or a VOB file?

Use the free MPEG Streamclip and, perhaps, Apple’s twenny dollah QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component to convert your source into something QuickTime friendly. (Thanks to this Macworld article) The easiest and best quality option being “Convert to MPEG…” from the File menu.

Step two: wrap in a simple SWF movie and embed into your page

for the wrapper go see Jeroen Wijering for his “JW FLV Media Player” . His documantation is good. Then there’s always Free Video Coding for another helping hand to generate the code you’ll need. Beware the one issue I found here was that I couldn’t mix relative and absolute URLs. Example code (with relatve URLs) follows below…

<embed src="video-flvplayer.swf?file=YourMovie.flv&autoStart=true"
width="480" height="360"
quality="high"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">

Lovely.

[Edit]
Must look into swfobject it’s “easy-to-use and standards-friendly method to embed Flash content”…