Do Google Video and YouTube use flv?

I'm trying to do some research about different ways of playing videos with flash, and I can't find good answers anywhere

Is it possible to load movie files of extensions other than flv to a flash video player? I don't mean embedded swf's, just plain old .mov or .wmv or .avi or something similar..

Do sites like youtube and google video load raw movie files or do they have converted to flv's automatically? If they do, how do you suppose that's done?

Flash can only load videos in the FLV format...

Both YouTube and Google video use FLV as the final video format - these are uploaded by users in various formats, and automatically converted to FLV on the server, using the On2 Flix Engine, or similar server side encoding tools...

http://www.on2.com/developer/flix-engine-sdk/

K.

Here's a tutorial on ffmpeg, which I beleive is how YouTube & GoogleVideo convert to flv:

http://soenkerohde.com/tutorials/ffmpeg/

Hope that helps!!

deadbeat, i think you're absolutely right!! it's so indeed

There are a bunch of posts about what sort of conversion they're using at:
http://blogs.chron.com/makingmovies/...e_and_the.html

but they never give a definitive answer...