My colleagues have just found out that when loading a Flash video file into Flash, the URL must end with “.flv”.
Flash doesn’t check the type – if the URL does not end with “.flv” it won’t even request the file. This could lead to an endless battle between the Flash developer and the web developer because the static version would work and the online version wouldn’t. The Flash developer requests a static .flv file on the disk but when the web developer changes the request to a CMS based file the video doesn’t load.
So, when using a CMS what you’d do is add a “&ext=.flv” or even just “&.flv” to the CMS provided URL (eg. /loadContent.php?id=123) for it to load. You can do that in Flash or in the code that passes the video URL to the player.
Funny.
Update: While checking other sites that load dynamic .flv files I found out that it might just look if the “.flv” is in the URL. Still funny though.