The easiest way to put a short video on a web page

The absolute easiest way is to use YouTube, or a site like it. But if you host the video yourself, the video quality will be better and you can control the look of your movie player.

I've found that the easiest way to add a video hosted on your own web server is with Adobe's free Flash Video player. It makes adding a video to a web page as easy as adding an image. Flash video is the most common video format on the web today, used by sites like YouTube and MySpace, and Adobe's player is only 15K in size and very easy to use and customize.

To get started, save your video in Flash Video format. This usually means saving it with the .flv extension. There are many video programs that can convert movies into Flash Video format, including the Flash Video Encoder program that comes with Adobe Flash.

Once you have your video in FLV format, download the Flash Video player from Adobe Labs. Unzip the files, run any of the example web pages, and you'll see the player playing a sample video. Now replace this sample video with your own video. To do this, view the web page's HTML and change the reference to the sample video's filename with your own movie's filename. The sample page should now be playing your video file.

At this point you should be done and can cut and paste the sample web page's HTML code into your web page. More detailed instructions are in the documentation that comes with the unzipped Adobe Flash Video player.