The following are guidelines and suggestions for implementing video sharing codes.

1. Choose whether you want to provide an embed or object tag-based code. The object tag is part of the W3C HTML standard (http //www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/objects.html), while the embed tag is not. However, the embed tag is considerably more compact, and is in fact supported by all major browsers. Since the sharing code must often be copied by users, the embed tag seems to be used more frequently.

2. Implement a resizable Flash player. Oftentimes when you video is posted to another site, the embedded SWF will be resized to a different size than the original. As much as possible you should implement your Flash video player to be resizable to any dimension.

3. Support the ‘autoplay’ parameter in the Flashvars setting. By default, your video should not play until the user presses the play button. However, if the ‘autoplay’ parameter is provided in the Flashvars with a value of ‘1’ or ‘true’, the the video should start playing automatically.

4. Provide as short and simple a code as possible. The more elements that appear in your code, the harder it is for a user to copy that code, and the more likely that something will go wrong when the code is pasted to another site. The gold standard here is the YouTube code. Their code doesn’t even use the Flashvars parameter, instead the video id is simply appended to the SWF url.

5. Implement the SWF src as a redirect. Define a “logical” URL for your embedded videos, and then return a redirect to the actual SWF, with potentially additional parameters appended. This can make your codes more resilient to implementation changes later on. Note, if you do implement a redirect, make sure that it returns very quickly. Otherwise you may seriously degrade your players load time.