It's now firmly established that the quickest way to stream video on the net is with Flash’s FLV or SWF formats. All the major video sites, including YouTube and Google Video use Flash to reproduce uploaded content. But what happens if you download a video and want to edit it? Most major video editors won’t accept Flash videos as a valid format to edit with so today we're giving you a low-down of some of the best ways to turn your Flash clips into something to work with.

The most popular program for converting from Flash to all major formats is CinemaForge. This program allows you to convert to AVI, MPEG, WMV, Real Media and Quicktime formats amongst others. CinemaForge also allows a limited amount of editing if you don’t want to import into another editor, including cropping, interlacing footage and even taking stills and building them into a montage.

Camtasia Studio is a complete application suite to record, edit and share your videos online, on CD or with a portable player. This highly-acclaimed program allows you to create screencasts or video tutorials, and can also be used to prepare presentations. Let’s get a run-down of all the things you can do with Camtasia Studio.

Thanks to the Camtasia Recorder, you can record and save screen captures or webcam broadcasts. We enjoyed playing around with it, adjusting the region size, highlighting cursor movement and setting elements such as time stamps and captions. Depending on what you need to record, you can also choose to hide or show the cursor and disable audio.

The production studio is the central piece of the application, from where you’ll be doing your editing. Drag and drop your recorded videos onto the timeline at the bottom of the interface. Camtasia embeds a player in the studio interface and you can constantly replay your production. From the menu on the left side you can choose from a selection of 18 different transitions, many call-outs (effectively bubbles to insert text into your video) or captions. The Zoom-n-Pan feature can be used to focus in on one part of the video in particular and teachers can use the Flash Quiz Survey feature to prepare multiple choice tests for their students. Camtasia Studio also includes an audio editor to simply record a voiceover directly to your video or tweak the audio in your production. Use Menu Maker and Theater to create full tables of contents and credits.

Although Microsoft's Silverlight was originally conceived as a competitor to Adobe Flash, it now finds itself competing with Abobe's web 2.0 platform, Adobe Air. The harsh truth is however, only 2 years on from its original release and Silverlight has already fallen woefully behind Adobe Air. In typical Microsoft style, the software giant surely missed the boat by aiming at a competitor for Adobe Flash when the web world was already looking towards interactive Web 2.0 platforms such as Adobe Air. It says a lot that the New York Times recently dumped Silverlight for Adobe Air to re-launch their Times Reader application.

Silverlight 3.0 has recently been released as an attempt to bridge the ever increasing chasm although it's developers rather than end-users who will notice the most new innovations.

Silverlight is a lightweight plugin that allows you to watch video content in your browser in much the same way as Adobe Flash does on sites like YouTube. It works with most major browsers including Firefox, Safari and Chrome and plays WMV, WMA and MP3 content. Although there is no prompt to restart the browser after installation, I recommend you do so as the first Silverlight content I accessed after installation simply crashed Firefox.

For end users, the most important improvements to the latest version are smoother streaming, DRM management, and an external content player. The pop-out player however is dependent on developers embracing it and as yet, there are few examples available. The smooth streaming feature will iron out many of the streaming programs that have plagued Silverlight in the past. If your bandwidth drops below 3Mbps, smooth streaming will kick-in so that your video isn't affected.

Silverlight 3 finally supports AAC audio decoding as well as hardware-accelerated H.264 video decoding which were big omissions in the previous release. Microsoft have also finally decided to open up the "native multimedia pipeline" so that other formats can be supported if the codecs are installed. Microsoft Silverlight 3.0 still maintains the ability to stream high resolution video and supports HD quality videos.

If you want to create content for Silverlight, you'll need Expression Studio and Visual Studio. In fact, this latest release is is of particular interest to developers because it adds 60 customizable controls, new layout containers, “deep linking” for page bookmarking, search engine optimization and enhanced data support. Animators are also now far better supported with "Perspective 3D" which enables transformation of 2D elements to 3D.

The signs are however that Microsoft has already realized that the battle for web content is already being won by the much slicker and stable Adobe Air platform and is therefore aiming Silverlight at business users. The Silverlight homepage boasts "Learn how Silverlight is right for your business" and companies such as Continental Airlines have adopted it for use in their reservation system indicating that Microsoft knows which side its bread is buttered on.

Silverlight 3.0 is no Adobe Flash and certainly no Adobe Air. However, there's probably no way you can avoid needing it at some point because there will always be some websites and developers that choose to base their content on Silverlight. Mobile devices are expected to be supported by 2010 although yet again, it may be a case of too little, too late for Microsoft.

If you remember, back in April we told you of the imminent release of Microsoft's Silverlight , their "cross browser, cross platform plug-in for delivering rich media experiences". Well, Silverlight is now out and you can finally install it and give it a try. This lightweight (1.4Mb) plug-in works on most popular browsers both on Mac and PC. It's really simple to install, and you'll just need to restart your browser to make it work. We went to the Silverlight home page to see the plug-in in action. Although it's got a lot of snazzy effects, obviously set up by Microsoft to impress users, the plug-in worked smoothly and we experienced good image quality.

Silverlight can stream high resolution video well and supports HD quality videos.Developers will be glad to know that you can write managed .NET code that runs right in the browser. Using Expression Studio and Visual Studio (which are separate from Silverlight), designers and developers can build their own Rich Internet Applications with Silverlight.

On the downside, Silverlight supports Windows Media audio and video, VC-1 and MP3 but not other popular formats like H.264, Flash or AAC. Flash still remains the reference by far, but with many big content providers looking to use Silverlight we should be seeing more of it in the near future.