Options for playing video?

Can anyone advise the best way of playing video?  I've tried these options:

1. Animation control.  I understand this has to be uncompressed AVI, which would make the files too large so I can't use this.

2. ActiveX control.  The Window Media Player control fails to load in my project. Shockwave Flash Object control and Microsoft Web Browser control load OK but I can't see any method that allows me to specify the video file path/name to play. It may be necessary to use AxObject but I don't understand how this is done and can't find any samples.

3. HTML control.  Issues an error message saying browser does not allow playback embedded video and also prompts user where to save the video file.

Hi, are you looking for an animation during complex oprations?
I had such a try and failed because either the animation run fluently or the background process run - never both at the same time :(
For HTML try an animated gif. I recommend you to avoid videos/animations which need plugins or additional viewers.
For shockwave you should call (dcl-AxControl-Invoke Unbenannt/Dialog1/ShockwaveFlash1 "Play") after (dcl-AxControl-Invoke Unbenannt/Dialog1/ShockwaveFlash1 "LoadMovie" layer [as int] url [as string]).

Regards, Fred

I was trying to play training videos at full screen size, which were launched from OpenDCL buttons.  I think there's a display size limit for the animation control so I didn't pursue that option.

I finally got the HTML control to play video by embedding Windows Media Player in a Word document as an ActiveX control, then saving the document as a single file web page (MHT).  If I load that MHT file in OpenDCL's HTML control it plays.

Thanks for the animated gif suggestion - I will try that next time as presumably it's not reliant on WMP.