Thanks everybody.
Greenie - Good call on the html5 w3 resource. Don't know if I have time to explore it right now, but should definitely make time soon to get up on that stuff.
Cleo, interesting that your player resorts to html5 as
backup. The wordpress plugins I use (based on jsplayer) are all configured to play html5 first, and fall back to flash if the browser/device can't play html5. You raise an important point though - a single .mp4 file encoded with h.264 plays in both modern flash players as well as html5 players in many, but not all, browsers. So a setup like you describe, or simply providing an .mp4/h.264 with a flash player, would seem to be a good solution.
and DiGiT- I'll check out this Freemake product you mention. Haven't heard of it.
So to summarize my current stance, I'm leaning towards just using
mp4/h264 files (presumably better quality than .flvs in flash ???) with either the jsplayer (html5) or a nice lightweight, customizable, open-source flash player I just found, called Flayr. It is working very nicely on several sites, and Google will like the fact it's only 6 or 7kb of script and style. in case anyone wants to have a look, i think the url is
http://www.flayr.net. it's very simple to configure, not fancy enough for many users I'm sure, but I love the small size and PageSpeed value. Of course I can't afford any kind of commercial licenses or other expenses right now, so open source works.