In addition to playing back animations and hosting games, the Flash player plays back videos, too. In fact, Flash video, as this feature is called, is likely the most common way to play video on the Web. If you’ve visited a little site called YouTube, you’ve seen Flash video in action. High among this format’s advantages—compared to competing standards like QuickTime or Windows Media Video—is that you can reasonably count on every visitor having the new Flash program to view your videos.

Dreamweaver makes it a snap to embed videos. Unfortunately, Flash can’t play back videos in just any old format, like MPEG or AVI, without a little help. And Dreamweaver can’t transform videos in these formats to the Flash video format (which has the extension .flv). Instead, you need one of several Adobe products to create Flash video files. If you bought the Creative Suite, you’re in business; it includes the Flash video encoder. Otherwise, you need Flash CS5 Pro or Flash CS4 Pro.