Putting SWF in wordpress posts

I've always found SWF files to be a pain in the butt. Seems some times they work, some times they don't. Or it's just me. I dread using them.

In the past, I have used a video plug-in, believe it was FLV-embed. Although it was made for FLV files, it played SWF files for me as well. And of course, with it, you can put in the url to the file, so it could be pretty much anywhere, no need for the media library (which is limited in file size).

Only drawback, I don't know how secure that would be, if you don't want people getting to the actual files. Just a thought.

Using shortcodes you can easily embed flash content into your post. Create a folder in your 'wpcontent/uploads' folder and name it 'swf' and upload all the swf into this folder.
Paste the following code into your functions.php file.

function shortcode_swfObj($atts, $content = null)
{
extract(shortcode_atts(array(
"width" => 'auto',
"height" => 'auto',
"id" => ''
), $atts));

$upload_dir = wp_upload_dir();
$src = $upload_dir['baseurl'] . '/swf/'.$id.".swf";
$output = '<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="'.$width.'" height="'.$height.'" id="'.$id.'" align="middle">';
$output .= '<param name="movie" value="'.$src.'"/>';
$output .= '<!--[if !IE]>-->';
$output .= '<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="'.$src.'" width="'.$width.'" height="'.$height.'">
<param name="movie" value="'.$src.'"/>';
$output .= '<!--<![endif]-->';
$output .= '<a href="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflash">';
$output .= '<img src="http://www.adobe.com/images/shared/download_buttons/get_flash_player.gif" alt="Get Adobe Flash player"/></a>';
$output .= '<!--[if !IE]>--></object><!--<![endif]--></object>';
return '<div class="swf">'.$output .'</div>';

}
add_shortcode('swf','shortcode_swfObj');

Shortcode syntax
--------------------
[swf src="video"]
or
[swf src="video" height="100" width="200"]

'video' is the file name without the extension. eg: 'video.swf'

That's interesting. I thought you needed a player so it plays in your page? Won't that code send the visitor kind of, away from the page, to a browser window to play the video?

If you have the flash player installed it will run the swf, similar to flash banners you see on websites. You will need a player if you are going to play a flv file.