sending information from scripting side to flash video player

Question

I don't know how to ask this, but the thing is that i was thinking that how does youtube or videofy.me like video blogs send the video path & all info to a flash video player i mean when e click on any video link how does it sets up everything and displays the chosen video, because actually i've created one but in that i had to set up the whole page via flash so that it can manipulate the information like path & name of the video, and cannot use html links, php and all.. so can u people tell me how do i start up & how this process is done & what i need to do & other important things on this.. i mean sending any info to a flash player via any scripting or server side language. Thank you..

Answer 1

There are several ways:

1. you can "hijack" clicks on links via JavaScript and JavaScript can communicate with flash (e.g. via ExternalInterface)
2. or you can change/add hash to the current page and Flash can be listening to such changes - this is how you could implement also flash deep linking for example
3. another option would be use javascript to remove the old video element from the page, and inject a new video (flash) element with the correct flashVars so the chosen video will play ...