How to show my video online?

Have a quick look at these
http://www.mediacollege.com/video/format/windows-media/streaming/embed.html
http://www.mioplanet.com/rsc/embed_mediaplayer.htm

they give a straight forward tutorial in howto embed windows media player in a webapage

That's not how YouTube works, riight?

And this model will work only with Internet Explorer. Am I right?

you tube uses progressive download of, I believe,  FLV content but because your files are WMV that won't work for you. If you want to playback the file from a flash player by progressive download you would have to transcode your video in to another format supported by flash such as FLV or MP4.

you can use this http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html to transcode your video

once you have got the video in the correct format have a look at this.
http://castfortwo.blogspot.com/2007/08/embedding-mp4-in-html-with-flash-9-beta.html

other browsers such as Firefox need the windows media player plugin installed  to watch embedded WMV content.

I want to embed big file there. Are you sure that SWF is the best format for this?

I have AVI. I can convert it to MPEG or FLV... You think that SWF is the right choice?

to be fair if it's a big file then streaming is probably the best choice, but you don't want to install anything server side.
Using flash, playback will begin immediately but it also means the file will eventually be downloaded to the user computer.

how big is the AVI?

and how long is the duration of the movie?

1 hour

I feel that I have to use server-side component for such type of video.

Could you please suggest how to organize it with minimal efforts? Thanks

a quick and dirty way of doing it would be to use VLC (www.videolan.org) to stream MP4 files to an embedded player.
see here http://www.videolan.org/doc/streaming-howto/en/ch02.html

this would require an embedded quicktime player because Windows Media Payer does not support MP4 natively a tutorial on how to do that can be found here.
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/tutorials/embed.html

I think this would require the minimum effort from your side to get working.
Dedicated free streaming servers such as Darwin Streaming server or even Windows Media Services require quite a bit of configuration to do exactly what you want and commercial streaming servers like Real Helix are very expensive.

Alternatively re-encode you content to get the best ballance of quality to file size and go for the progressive download method.

what if I create my own PHP streaming engine (very simple, like this one: http://www.flashcomguru.com/index.cfm/2005/11/2/Streaming-flv-video-via-PHP-take-two) and use a simple Flash player (http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Media_Player)

will this combination work? I will stream my FLV files in HTTP format, and web player will show them.

I can implement it easily, just want to make sure it's a correct approach

thanks for your help!