spokesperson video

jgdescort,

When my former company was bought out, we had to come up with a video conference solution which would work across LAN, WAN, Internet, and Mobile platforms, with multiple OS involved.  What we ended up using was Adobe Connect:

http://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect/tech-specs.html

I would suggest giving them a look over, as that product, middle of the road in cost, accomplished all your stated objectives.

DrUltima

jgdescort,

You're talking about a video that pops up when the visitor hits the site and has a talking head or head+body, right?

Like these folks? http://www.websitetalkingheads.com/

Yes but I am not looking for third party tool. Thanks

Wow... I totally misread that Question.  I am sorry, as my "Answer" has nothing at all to do with your Question....

DrUltima

Right, just confirming what you were looking for.  

There is nothing magical about that.  It's a simple video in a positioned div of someone on a pure white background (assuming that's the background color on the site) set to autoplay when the user hits the site.  You will need the following for normal web sites:

A custom player skin with only the mute button
The video in MP4 format
Appropriate HTML code to position the div and embed the player.

Flash is still the obvious choice for this, but that will rule out the iDevices.  To make it truly cross-platform compatible you would have to think about HTML 5 but there are still some headaches with the various desktop browsers and HTML 5 video.  You might end up running a browser detection script and switching the player based on which device and browser combo is accessing the page.

Look at the JW Media Player and http://videojs.com/ for HTML5 players...

Thanks. I have given up on idea of html5 now since I don't have much time. I need to get this working by this week. I can get the flash video to work on white back ground but I have to put this on top of text or another flash. I know it works on some site overlapping the text (though I can't get it to work. Also I am new at style sheet and videos)  but I am not sure if would it work overlapping another flash. Thanks again for your help.

Use an absolutely positioned div along with correct z-index values to get it to appear on top of other elements on the page.

Thank you so much for your help. Do you know how to get rid of the flash player control from the screen once video is played? The control shows up when the mouse is in the display area and disappears once mouse is moved from that area. I would like to remove it once the video is played once. Is it possible? Thanks