rocknbil - 5:01 pm on Jul 5, 2008 (gmt 0)

I have a series of Flash banners which have embedded video and they are reaching around 900Kb each?

This is probably the wrong approach, especially if you're going to have it on many pages of your site. Although I'm not the most strict in respect to optimizing page sizes, 900K for a single object is HUGE. Cutting down your video and sacrificing content or quality is a compromise, one you shouldn't have to do.

You need to look at methods of importing the video on demand. This is where streaming video comes in. Normally this is done with a player of some sort, but it's pretty easy to do this with a single play button. You create a video object, name the instance on the stage (my_video,) create your button, then onMouseDown you do something like:

var my_nc:NetConnection = new NetConnection();
my_nc.connect(null);
var my_ns:NetStream = new NetStream(my_nc);
my_video.attachVideo(my_ns);
my_ns.setBufferTime(5);
my_ns.play("/path_to_your_banner.flv");

(Directly from "creating a video banner" in ActionScript 2.0 manual, Working with Images, Sound, and Video > About using FLV video > Creating a video banner )

Using XML import or variables, you could put a variable in the page and pass it to Flash, so all of your series could play different videos through a single "player."