I hate just post­ing a YouTube video here, in part because it’s lazy and bor­ing, but also because YouTube videos are liable to dis­ap­pear at any moment, and even if they don’t, YouTube has to die someday, right?, whereas kbps will last for­ever, and then hun­dreds of years from now its YouTube posts will be inex­plic­a­bly empty.

Part of what helped launch YouTube to the pop­u­lar­ity it enjoys now is the ease of its player. Every­body has Flash, so while most video sites were mak­ing you do 30 min­utes of work installing plu­g­ins to play a 12-second clip, YouTube just worked. The object that’s embed­ded on a YouTube page is an .swf (Shock­wave Flash) file, a video player in which an .flv (Flash video) file is “wrapped.” So, in order to host a video your­self, you need these two components.

The .flv file — the video itself — can actu­ally be down­loaded directly from YouTube quickly and eas­ily with the All-In-One Video Book­marklet. Just put it in your links tool­bar, then on any YouTube page, click it and fol­low the down­load link. Alter­nately, you can use the VideoDown­loader Fire­fox extension.

You can’t sim­i­larly steal YouTube’s .swf video player, so instead, use the open-source Flash Video Player by Jeroen Wijer­ing. It’s a .zip file with sev­eral readmes and sources, but all you really need from it is the flvplayer.swf file.

Upload flvplayer.swf and the .flv video file to your server, and use embed code sim­i­lar to YouTube’s:

Full doc­u­men­ta­tion on the avail­able options comes in a readme.html file. But essen­tially that’s all it takes. And of course, you’re not lim­ited to YouTube, as there are plenty of soft­ware tools to con­vert most video for­mats to .flv, for exam­ple Medi­a­Coder.

Here’s the result: