Engaged and Underage
I just discovered that a coworker friend of mine has a son who was a groomsman for the guy on MTV's Engaged and Underage. In one
clip they show him getting his eyebrows waxed.
Fast forward the Mother's day episode until the timeline reads 3:25 and you'll see the shot I used in the thumbnail for this post.
Adobe Flash Player
Just about every (98.7% according to Adobe) Internet-enabled PC has the Adobe Flash Player. The Flash player piece of software that adds functionality to your web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc). When you give your web browser an address either by clicking on a hyperlink or typing the address into the address bar, it retrieves a document for you. If the document it retrieves is an HTML file, then that document may contain links to other pages, images and objects. One type of object that can be included in an HTML page is a Flash Object. You're probably already very familiar with Flash objects because you use them to view video on YouTube. The player that loads in the webpage is a Flash Object.
This above relationship is also valuable to understand because there are a variety of flash objects available on the web that have nothing to do with watching video. If you're among the 98.7% of the people who already have the flash player installed then you can run these objects without any additional effort. The Frogger game below is another example of a flash object.
When the Flash object loads it can retrieve other files from the internet. In the case of the YouTube flash object, it downloads the Flash Video file. There are a variety of formats used store videos, flv is one of them; other formats include wmv and mov. The following diagram shows the interrelation of the resources we've discussed. Internet explorer is listed on the left, it's a program used to browse the internet. The Flash add-on is loaded by internet explorer to handle Flash objects. The Flash object (e.g. YouTube player) is loaded by the Flash add-on. If the flash object you happen to load is the YouTube Flash object then it loads the Flash Video file (e.g. files with the flv extension).
This relationship helps to explain the use of Flash Video files. As I mentioned before there are at least two other formats for videos: wmv and mov. There are other flash objects that support Flash Video files. Just about all the popular video sites seem to include one. Metacafe and Blip.TV for example each have their own flash object to play Flash Video files. However, there don't seem to be any flash objects readily available to play wmv or mov files. If you wanted to include wmv and mov files in your webpage you have to use some other plugin. None of these plugins are as popular as the Flash plugin. If you have Windows Media player installed you most likely have a plugin to handle wmv files. If you have iTunes installed you most likely have a plugin to handle mov files. If you're writing a web page and you want to ensure that everyone is going to be able to watch your video, then the safest way is to save it as a Flash Video and find a flash object to read it.
To learn more about Adobe Flash, visit the Wikipedia site. To see what version of the Adobe Flash player you have installed, visit the Macromedia site.