Today I got a question from a client about how to add support for Flash videos within SharePoint 2007.  I found a number of very old posts, and some that were more recent, but I had to cobble together a lot of different pieces to finally figure out how to create these steps to illustrate the process.

I hope that these steps are of interest, and save some time for someone who is looking to do the same thing again one day.  I’d love to hear how these steps could be presented more efficiently, or where some time could be saved.  One thing I learned, is that I’m glad that there are some companies that are trying to automate this to help enterprises with processing videos at high volume levels.  I’m helping one of those companies now — Ooyala — to come up with an easy way to manage video.  When that is ready to ship, I’ll let you know here.

Meanwhile – back to the steps…

1. Download a Flash Video Player web part for SharePoint 2007
1. There is a sample file available for free from Microsoft’s open source catalog, www.codeplex.com.
2. Go to http://svp.codeplex.com.  This is the web part that you’ll be installing as part of this example.
3. Go to Downloads section, and click on the recommended download.  http://svp.codeplex.com/releases/41778/download/110456
4. Click through the License Agreement.
5. Save the downloaded file to c:\downloads\SharePointVideoPlayer.wsp
2. Deploy the web part to your site collection
1. Open a cmd window as an Administrator

2. cd c:\program files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN

3. Stsadm -o addsolution -filename c:\downloads\SharePointVideoPlayer.wsp

4. Stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs

5. For this next line, you will need the URL of your Site Collection.  In this command line, my site collection is: “http://shrpnt2007:28656“

6. Stsadm -o deploysolution -name SharePointVideoPlayer.wsp -allowgacdeployment -force -immediate -url "http://shrpnt2007:28656"

7. Stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs

8. Iisreset

3. Activate the Site Collection Feature
1. Go to Site Actions -> Site Setting -> Site Collection Features
2. Locate SharePoint Video Player feature and click “Activate”
4. The Above steps only have to be done ONCE.  Once the web part is activated as a Site Collection Feature, then you can add it to as many pages as you’d like using the below steps.
5. Add the web part to your page
1. Click Site Actions -> Edit Page
2. Click “Add a Web Part”
3. Add the “SharePoint Video Player” Web Part
6. Modify the web part properties for the web part to point to the hosted flash video file
1. Edit the web part properties
2. Scroll down to “Video Player Properties”
3. Modify entry for “FLV file”.  Use something that looks like this:

4. <object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" id="ooyalaPlayer_6m3j0_gow1g8v5" width="640" height="480" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/swflash.cab">
    <param name="movie" value="http://player.ooyala.com/player.swf?embedCode=MwdXlpMjqnvUZs3V8Tujt5d1oU_ItJSr&version=2" />
    <param name="bgcolor" value="#000000" />
    <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" />
    <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" />
    <param name="flashvars" value="embedType=directObjectTag&embedCode=MwdXlpMjqnvUZs3V8Tujt5d1oU_ItJSr" />
    <embed src="http://player.ooyala.com/player.swf?embedCode=MwdXlpMjqnvUZs3V8Tujt5d1oU_ItJSr&version=2" bgcolor="#000000" width="640" height="480" name="ooyalaPlayer_6m3j0_gow1g8v5" align="middle" play="true" loop="false" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="&embedCode=MwdXlpMjqnvUZs3V8Tujt5d1oU_ItJSr" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed>
    </object>

7. Click OK and Exit Edit Mode.
8. The above Flash embed string is for streaming a static video.  For streaming a live video, you follow the same approach, but the Flash embed string is slightly different, but only because the source file is a live streaming video and not a static streaming video.

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" id="ooyalaPlayer_6ubv0_gow38rxq" width="480" height="270" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/swflash.cab">
 <param name="movie" value="http://player.ooyala.com/player.swf?embedCode=BrMWtjMjpJU-7gE0lQqvnK75Wulzo6kT&version=2" />
 <param name="bgcolor" value="#000000" />
 <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" />
 <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" />
 <param name="flashvars" value="embedType=directObjectTag&embedCode=BrMWtjMjpJU-7gE0lQqvnK75Wulzo6kT" />
 <embed src="http://player.ooyala.com/player.swf?embedCode=BrMWtjMjpJU-7gE0lQqvnK75Wulzo6kT&version=2" bgcolor="#000000" width="480" height="270" name="ooyalaPlayer_6ubv0_gow38rxq" align="middle" play="true" loop="false" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="&embedCode=BrMWtjMjpJU-7gE0lQqvnK75Wulzo6kT" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed>
 </object>

I’m a selfish blogger, and I’ve got a sneaky feeling that I’ll need this list of steps again and again. I hope that it will be useful to you, also.

Yes, even for SharePoint 2007.  After all, some of your best friends are still using SharePoint 2007!

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