Insert H.264 mp4 Video File as Flash Video Using Dreamweaver CS3

I discovered a trick that allows you to take advantage of the Flash player's new support for H.264 encoded video, even with the older CS3 version of Dreamweaver.

It is a simple sleight of hand -- first create your H.264 encoded mp4, then change the extension from .mp4 to .flv. Then proceed as usual to insert the flash video in Dreamweaver. (see image below) The only issue is that whe you click "Detect Size", it won't work automatically, so you have to manually specify the size of the video. But other than that, everything proceeds as if the file was a regular .flv file.

This of course is a kludge, which perhaps will come back to bite in some way if someone unknowingly stumbles across the misnamed FLV. Also, since I've only tested it with a couple of files, I can't vouch for it working universally. So I'm not really advocating the approach -- just pointing it out as a quick solution that avoids having to re-encode a perfectly good mp4 file into the less efficient flv format.

Note that another alternative for using H.264 video with Flash if you have the full CS3 suite is to use the Flash program itself. When you select the source file for the FLVPlayer component, you can select the MP4 file directly, without any need to change the extension to FLV. The only wrinkle is that the browse function will only show FLV files, making it difficult to select the MP4. But as shown in the image below, if you put an "*" in the filename position, and press "Enter", then you will be able to browse all files, making it possible to select the .mp4 file without any subterfuge of changing the extension. This is probably a better approach than I outlined above, but with my limited Flash expertise, it takes me about 10 minutes to do this in Flash vs. 1 minute in Dreamweaver (vs. potentially hours to re-encode the video to FLV, in which case the video quality also suffers vs H.264 at a given bitrate.). So if the goal is just to get some H.264 video up on a website in a hurry, the Dreamweaver approach may be a useful kludge.

Browse for FLV source file dialogue, Adobe Flash CS3 Professional