how do i make SWF movies that play on mouseover?

That's not really how it works. A SWF is an applet, or script. It's like a program. An FLV is a movie, like a .mov or .wmv file. The way flash video works, is you have a SWF program that plays a flash video (FLV).

Theoretically, in flash - you could write a flash script to - on mouse over, begin playing an embedded video (the video itself would be apart of the SWF file, along with the scripting). What you would have to do is create a flash video for each your movies - open the Flash program, drop the video file into the library, and save the flash file. It'd be like you have this single flash file - with some action script that states [[play movie1.flv in library on mouse over]], and every time you had a new movie you would name it movie1.flv open this flash file REPLACE the movie and then resave the flash file -- so you would be left with a new SWF with the video embedded in itself, which would play that embedded video on mouse over.

However that is really backwards from the way it should be done. The way it should be done is to write a SWF flash program that says [[play this flashvar on mouseover]], and that flashvar would be the flv. So your SWF would pretty much be a video player, but without any controls -- all it would do is play the movie on mouse over. You save your movies as FLVs, and set them as flashvars when embedding the code to your page.

Are you trying to stop people from stealing your videos? Because there is probably a better way than what you're proposing. I mean, if you're only going to make like 3 of these movies -- and update them once every six months. Then it wouldn't be so bad to do it the way you want to. But if you're talking about a lot of videos, then it would be a MAJOR pain. And there are plenty of SWF rippers out there that can pull apart all the components of a SWF file (so someone could get the video file out of it anyway).

Just google "On MouseOver Goto and Play frame XX"

no not trying to stop people from stealing videos -trying to do something like this tube site does http://www.empflix.com

javascript ftw... not that much to it eod... make sure you've got a good streaming setup for your flv's or mp4's to avoid bw overages.

take a look at the animated gif in my sig - what i want is something like that, but a still image and then when somebody mouses over it the video plays, stops on mouse out

Don't know why you'd be going that route at this point in the game.. Things like the iPad don't support flash.. HTML5 is phasing flash out as well to play videos directly. For long term you'd be better off encoding them H264.

its not for members area content, have all sorts of formats for members. these mouseovers would be used on a tour rather than using animated GIFs - when you convert even short videos to animated GIFs they are too big, much bigger than an SWF.

use flash softwares it can be create the a sequence you want in that softwares

There are onRollOver and onRollOut events in ActionScript, but it might be easier not to do these as SWFs with embedded videos, but instead animated GIFs. See how xhamster does it. They are just keyframes played slowly. They aren't full motion video.

And you're only going to need to do it once, or maybe twice or something on a tour page? Not thousands of times over like they do on that tube site? Because what they do on the tube site is overkill for what you would need then. Unless I'm mistaken - the CMS for that tube site makes a sort of thumbnail video when the user adds a new video - and that thumbnail is a snapshot type thumbnail with a few screens from the video taken from throughout the video at whatever timed interval.

Your best solution (IMO), is going to have someone write you a flash video player in action script (Actionscript > Timeline Bullshit). The Flash video player plays an FLV from a URL when the SWF is moused over. The URL for the FLV is a flashvar.

This would allow you to reuse the SFW anywhere and as many times as you want on any website you ever have. All you have to do is make an FLV video out of whatever video you want, and when you embed your SWF and set the flashvar to where you have uploaded the FLV.

So it'd be like this:
Everytime you make a new movie and embed it to your website, you'd just change that url variable in the flashvar to point to the FLV.

I'm sure someone on GFY knows action script enough to write up something like this for you.

that makes sense but why not just dump the video into Flash and do the mouseover code in Actionscript and output as a self contained SWF file to embed on the web page?

I tend to think down-the-line type of scenario. Where as creating a self contained SWF is the easiest and quickest right now. Six months from now it might not hold up under new circumstances or in a different situation. I always try to go down the path that is more future proof. Specially with Flash too. It's just going down the drain so fast these days. jQuery and HTML5 are the future.

What if in a year you change it to have controls, or something else in the player? You have to rebuild however many SWF files one by one. Instead of just rebuilding that one single SWF player. Could be a number of things too with that logic. Any little change like a sparkly flash when the video starts, etc anything you can imagine - would be rebuilding every single one ever made instead of the one single player file. Or what if someone else took over the project. Anyone can make videos in FLV format and upload them. But not everyone could take a .fla Flash Project and go rebuilding new self contained SWFs in Flash. Even people with step by step instructions can screw that up.

Exactly what I thought... you could easily pop that together with js

Use a hidden div... load after pageload is complete to keep page speed up
On mouseover show div using css and trigger js to load player
On mouseout unload player and rehide div