Here's a Connect presentation that some of you may find useful. Kevin Towes presents on the history, concepts and development tasks of building a media player in Flash.
I think his presentation is particularly useful to less technical people who would like to understand a bit more about the Flash development process, and also get a feel for the challenges in building a video player - it turns out it's not as easy as some may think. And since this is what I have been doing a few times over it makes me look really clever.