Best way to embed animations

[Paula]

Hi, I'm working on a site which will have animations on basically everypage, it's an animated character speaking... We want this character to appear on white background so it's like he's just on page with no movie controls or anything.

I'm trying to find the best way to do this..

My first thought was Flash video, which seems okay although at the moment I can't figure out how to get rid of the control buttons when I embed it in Dreamweaver (any ideas?)

Or Windows Media Video which is the format it is in at the moment. Found a script to make it work on IE and Firefox, but before the animation plays it has a large black square which looks pretty horrible. Also I had a script for text to only appear after a certain amount of time, and when it appeared the movie stopped playing so I guess it messed with it or something.

Then there's the matter that some of the movies might be kinda large and require preloading...I'm trying to find out a way for the flash in the flash forum already, but obviously I can't do that with WMV.. so really wondering what your thoughts are on the best way to have this character appear natural, animated on the webpage. Thanks.

[Ryan Fait]

I would use a Flash swf. There are no controls by default and you can use a preloader that lets people know detail status of what's happening. I've also seen video where the controls are hidden, so I'm sure there is a relatively simple way of doing that, but I'd stick with Flash.

[Paula]

Cool yeah, I think I should be able to use the flash video in an SWF when I get my preloader working. Thanks.

[Ryan Fait]

I've used this preloader before:

http://www.freehandsource.com/_test/preloader.html

Works nicely.