Strategies for presenting videos over the internet

[george 1]

With my dial up, those cute little movies on MySpace look bad, because they have to load, and they show little bits of the video as it is loading. I guess this is called streaming. But it does not make for a good display, at least not on machines and connections which are not state of the art. I am also presenting wmv files on a web page. And my page has this same problem. I am looking for amiable solutions. I suppose one would be to present a loading message in place of the video loading. But how do I do that? I use the following snippet to display the video (abbreviated here)

<object id="MediaPlayer1" abbrev. ></object>[b]<script for="MediaPlayer1" event="scriptCommand(Type, Param)" language="Jscript">[/b]			alert(Param);</script>

The Param parameter lets me know every time I need to change a gif image in another frame. Is there a way I can tell when the clip has stopped loading, so I can remove the loading message, and restart the video? TIAGeorge