Hey everyone,

Hopefully some helpful advice...

I finally managed to get an external .flv flash movie playing within my dnn site. Here's a list of moons that have to be in alignment for it all to work (I've seen parts of this in multiple sites but not all in the one spot. I was using Flash Pro 8 for this:

1. Make sure your hosting provider adds the flv MIME type to IIS (required for IIS 6). Just google for IIS flv MIME type
2. You need to create a swf file as a container for your .flv movie. You can't just embed/reference a flv from html. Create an empty flash document in your favourite flash authoring program.
3. Copy your flv and the video player swf skin ( I just used one of the standard ones that comes with Flash 8 pro ) you intend to use to a location in your DNN site.
4. Within Flash 8 Pro you can use the Embed Video wizard to choose your flv and video skin file. When asked for the location of the flv file you should give it the full URL of the flv file in your DNN site. ( e.g. http://mydomain.com/Portals/2/myflv.flv )
5. When choosing the skin you'll need to select the custom skin option and give it the full URL of the swf skin file ( e.g. http://mydomain.com/Portals/2/steelallover.swf)
6. (Optional) You can set the flash editor publish options to generate bootstrap html code to automatically produce the required html to plug into your site. Refer to the Flash Games tutorial on this excellent site for an example of this code. Google movies and YouTube both supply this code snippet when you want to link to one of their movies.
7. Add a html/text module ( FCK editor has a nifty embed flash funtion that seemed to work quite well for me ) or 3rd party flash module. Copy in the bootstrap flash html code. The final moon to align is that you need to ensure that any paths mentioned in the bootstrap html are the URLs you used in Steps 4 and 5. I did find that relative URLs ( e.g. /Portals/2/myflv.flv ) worked fine here.
8. That's it, preview the site and hopefully you'll see your flash movie.

This is all probably simple stuff for those flash gurus out there but as a flash noob I spent a number of hours trying to get this going (most of it being stuck cause of step 1!)

regards,

Adam.

Thanks ... I looked hard for this answer.

I've moved this useful tip to the Quick Tips forum so hopefully it should be easier for everyone to find in the future,