Well, I'm going to do something unusual here. I'm going to defend Boonex on a programming issue. ;)

jdoyle55 mentioned that it would be nice to allow videos from anywhere on the web. This opens up several issues.

1. From a legal standpoint, it could open a person up to DCMA issues or at least to the issue of a "Cease and Desist" order if the content posted was copyrighted. At least with Youtube, they monitor the copyright issues pretty heavily, and will remove any videos that don't see more comply for us.

2. From a security standpoint this can cause a lot of potential havoc. Videos that are uploaded directly to Dolphin are re-processed by ffmpeg, thereby (theoretically) "sanitizing" them. The "Black Hat" internet community (virus writers, spammers, hackers, etc...) have discovered that many types of video files can be laced with small pieces of embedded code or scripts that execute when played. Allowing these files to be embedded could result in your site actually being blacklisted as a "Hacking" or "Trojan Horse" website by google and firefox. (as well as many Antivirus programs) Additionally, if Boonex allowed SWF files to be directly embedded, it could open up the site to all sorts of Cross-Browser scripting that could allow password stealing, etc....

3. Finally, as a professional internet developer, I can tell you: It's just plain HARD to support all the different types of video files out on the internet today. If you had the address of the actual FLV file, then yes, it's fairly easy to drop that in, but sites such as Youtube hide the FLV (the actual video file) behind the player program, and normally require you to embed their own player. Many other sites do the same thing, and there is not really any standard behind this. (They WANT you to visit THEIR site after all) It often isn't possible to just type in the address to the page that the video's on, you actually have to know where the video itself is located.