Flash Workflow with 3rd Parties

Question

I have created a .flv with the intention of making it
available for progressive download from a standard web server. I
publish my .fla and create the default .html and .swf files and
they work just fine on my website and local machine while testing
the application and playing the .flv file. My challenge is
packaging up this application for a third party web designer to use
who some has familiarity with .html and does not have any flash
experience. Is there any easy way to prepare flash for hand off to
a third party and make it easy for them to post and play the files
on their web server ? Does anyone have an example of an easy way to
make the files play independently without knowing the path of the
destination web server in advance ?
What question would I want to ask the third party to make
sure I get the path of their web server correct ? would it be
something like public/ ?
I tried to do this as well and then my application no longer
worked as the path did not reflect the actual location of my .flv
file.... I am sooo confused.
I think I am struggling to ask this question correctly. Any
help in making my .flv more portable with limited knowledge of
their final destination path would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Andrew

Answer 1

Andrew,
There are a couple of things that you can do. While you may
not know the server path, you DO know enough things to have the SWF
work.
You will always know where the FLV is in relation to the SWF,
you must, or else you cannot ever make this work. With this
information, you can use relative paths to link to the FLV. The
relative path will, by default, start at the location where the SWF
is on the server.
IE:
In the SWF, you link the video as: "videos/myVid.flv"
This SWF will look, starting from its own location, into a
folder called "videos" for the file "myVid.flv"
But, I must stress, while relative paths work, an absolute
URL is always better (in my opinion). If you know what the path to
your SWF is going to be, regardless of server, you can construct an
absolute path.
We do this all the time where I work. As we have more than
400 locations across the country, we send the files we build out to
a server at each location. We know where the files are in relation
to the root of the server. So we open a new LocalConnection
instance, and grab the IP property to get the server path, then
build an absolute path as follows: "
http://"+myIP+"/pathToSWF/pathToFLV/myVideo.flv"
- where "myIP" is the ip address of the server, "pathToSwf" is the
path on the server where the SWF is, "pathToFLV" is the path to the
FLV from where the SWF is, and "myVideo.flv" is the video. But,
this can only be done where you know the location of your files on
the server. If you don't know this, then you have to use the
relative paths detailed above.