How I made my video into a flash video

First of all, I shot the various elements with a camcorder. I roped in members of my family to appear. I then downloaded all the recordings and edited them together in a package called Movie X4 by Serif. This produced a finished video in .AVI format. The next stage was to get the video onto the webpage which was not as easy as I thought. AVI format is not suitable because of it's size so I knew that I needed to convert it to a compressed format, preferably one that could be 'streamed' such as Flash. Streaming would enable the video to play almost immedeately which is important as viewers don't want to wait. Firstly, I tried various free file format convertors from the web but none really achieved the result that I wanted. I then turned to Adobe Flash where I was able to convert my .AVI file to Flash format with the associated support files. I was then able to insert this into my web page where it would play in a window as soon as the viewer pressed the 'play' button. I chose not to have it play automatically as this gets annoying and I also decided not to have it automatically repeat. Furthermore I deliberately omitted the 'full screen' option as this would degrade the quality of the video.