Adding video to a Drupal6 web site

One of my web sites requested that I add a video clip to the web site.  At the current time, they have no video files on the site.  I was looking for the easiest way to add the capability without requiring hard coding and it needed to support playing a flash file with a preview image.

I looked through Aaron Winborn's book, Drupal Multimedia, and it provided a number of ideas, including using Filefield with JQuery_Media, and Embedded Video field.  I had a large flv file, so I wanted to FTP it to the web site, then link to it to view it.  I couldn't find any way other than to hard code the JW Player to do this.

I then tackled how to upload the file using the Upload module in Drupal.  I found how to modify php.ini on this web site's hosting provider.  In checking among the alternatives, I saw that Filefield is included in Drupal7 core, so that biased me toward that approach.

I got JQuery_Media working to play the video file, but I couldn't figure out how to get it to show the preview .jpg file before playing, and that was a requirement.  A black screen before playing isn't very useful.  Filefield points to Imagefield as a way to show a preview, but I couldn't see how to overlay the preview over the video window.  Aaron shows how to modify the theme to make this possible, but I thought there should be an easier way.

There is: SWFTools.  Using this module and Filefield, you can upload the video file and the preview file, then use an input filter: [swf file="video.flv" flashvars="image=bg-image.jpg"] to place the video into the body.  This looks to me as a better solution as I can control where the video appears in the body, which the other solutions didn't do.

NOTES:

Information on changing file upload limits: http://drupal.org/node/422474

Installing SWFTools takes a little work, but it is well documented: http://drupal.org/node/303203