Newbie question on Flash video players, products/SDKs, and API

I'm a C programmer and a total newbie to Flash/video/web world. Don't know where/how to start, and so would greatly appreciate your initial help.

Question

If I need to host flash videos off of my website (instead of embedding YouTube links on my webpages),

AND

If I need to provide pla开发者_如何学JAVAyer API like YouTube's that can be used, say, for supporting chromeless player versions customizable via this custom API of mine...

THEN

What do I need to do essentially...?

1. Write a custom Flash video player? If yes, how? I mean, using which Adobe products / tools / SDKs / language(s)? Is there anything free/opensource available for doing this? Especially, for Linux platform?

2. Write a new browser (firefox) plugin for users visiting my site? Not sure how my custom Flash video player will get to the user visiting my site for the first time?

3. Any books, resources that cover this problem well?

4. Does the Flash content need to hosted off of a Windows server only?

Currently lost. Thanks in advance,

/SD

Flash has video playback support built-in, so all you need to do is use the Flash authoring environment or Flex to compile a .SWF file that uses the video API, with some buttons to stop and start the stream, volume, seeking, anything else you want your player to do.

Many people have already done this for you, in a way you can easily use from simple HTML. See eg. OSFLV, Flowplayer, JW...

Write a new browser (firefox) plugin for users visiting my site? Does the Flash content need to hosted off of a Windows server only?

Lord no! Flash video would never have taken off if it was just another custom-server+custom-plugin piece of unpleasantness. Though special streaming servers are possible, for the most part it's just an FLV file sitting on a web server.

(FLV is the video format supported by the Flash video playing functions. There are many, many tools you can use to convert other formats to it; I use Avidemux.)

If you are planning to use a "Progressive Download" approach, then your FLV files can be hosted on a Windows or a Linux box. Be aware that:

• it is no as efficient as true streaming.
• you may not use it for live events nor only for stored video files.
• it cannot automatically detect the end user's connection speed.
• it is not possible to jump ahead to another part while it's downloaded.
• the video file will be saved on the end user's computer.

If you are planning to use a "Streaming" approach then you can either buy and use Adobe's solution (Flash Media Server, available on both Windows and Linux box) or sign up for a hosted solution. On this page you will find recommended providers by Adobe. I personally have been using Influxis's hosting with success for a couple of years already.

You can also write your own streaming server but that would be a lot of hard work. If you are interested in that, I would recommend you have a look a Red5 which is an open source Flash Server written in Java.