Complete Crap - Being Revised - Actuall, some is quite good

About Flash

Flash is an authoring tool that can create anything from a simple animation to a complex interactive web application such as an online store. Flash applications can be made media rich by adding pictures, sound, and video.

Flash Video

Flash Video is increasingly being used as the format of choice to display video clips on the Internet. Flash offers small file sizes, player customization and platform compatibility. While many media types require the use of plugins - Quicktime - which are limited in their distribution, Flash Player plugins for many of the popular platforms, including Windows, MacOSX and Linux. Flash is used as the basis for many popular video sites such as Youtube and Google Video.

Flash Video (.flv extension) is a container format, which means that it is not a video format in itself, but is able to import other formats which then are republished in the Flash format.