mp4 through flowplayer takes forever to begin playing
 

So I have an mp4 file embeded through Flowplayer, it it takes way to long to begin playing, after you push play... Yet my FLV files, start pretty much right away.. what am i doing wrong?

Your problem is that the mp4 file has its metadata at the end of the file which means flowplayer needs to download the whole thing before it can start playing.

Run the encoded mp4 through MP4Box which will put the metadata at the start of the file instead of the end and allow it to be played with only a little buffering.

You can either use MP4Box, or qt-faststart (which comes with ffmpeg).

Even with metadata at the front of the clip I've seen slow starts with pseudo streaming large MP4 that aren't there with FLV. I notice a lot of big tubes use FLV rather than MP4 containers (even though they offer MP4 downloads) and suspect this may be a factor.

You can use h264 + aac in a FLV container.