I'm a newbie to embedded video playback but am pretty comfortable with most tech issues.

I'm looking for a solution that will allow me to (a) embed video in a website, but that (b) will allow me to control the playback of the video dynamically based on actions performed on the embedding web page rather than by clicking on player buttons. Does anyone know if this is possible in the Flash API or in any other video streaming API? Does HTML5 or Javascript even allow that sort of linking between page objects?

I know that flash allows the 'start' paramter to be set in embedded videos so that playback starts at a specific time. So in a worse case scenario I could reload the video display page with a changed start time. But for this to even work I would have to be able to control the point at which playback stops. I can't see how this would operate from the docs.

Any suggestions welcome!!!