Creating FLV Files
So, you and your class have created and recorded the next movie with your RCA Small Wonder camera. How do you go about sharing it?

You could gather around the small screen but that really isn't practical. You could connect the camera to a data projector and play it through there. Or, you could download the file from the camera to your computer and play it from your local hard drive.

All work nicely but how do you share it with the rest of world via a web page or your wiki?

The files that are created with your camera are in WMV format. You could upload that file to your web presence and put a link to it. At that point, you're relying on your visitors to be able to click the link, wait until the file is transferred to their computer, and then have it invoke the appropriate players on their machine.

All of this requires a great deal to fall into place. Surely, there's a better way.

With the Ministry of Education licensed Adobe Create Suite CS3, there is. Included in the package is Adobe Media Encoder CS4.

The Media Encoder quickly and efficiently will take your WMV or a host of other file formats as input and generate FLV files as output.

What's exciting about this is that we live in an embed world. The file format for this world is indeed FLV.

Once you've got your file in FLV format, it embeds nicely into your webpage or your wiki and all that the visitor to your resource needs is a browser with updated Adobe Flash player.

FLV has the ability also to progressively play as it downloads. Embed that and you have a very professional approach to incorporating video in your resource.

Watch the movie below to see it in action.