I have a few vids on my site(hobby), I uploaded my videos to google then I got the embed code and pasted it into my website. I then made the videos on Google private so they would not show up in a public search.

I am not happy with the quality of google video so I will upload the videos in wmv and then embed them into the webpage.
If you embed a video in to a web page,, people can play them but they cannot download them.
I think thats where your friend got mixed up,
embeded video does not need to fully download before it starts playing.
If you look at my site on my videos page you will see that the first video there has a link below it to a hi rez version but you cannot download the video only play it!!
Hope i didnt confuse you any more!

James

Here is the code you past into your web page to embed a WMV


"<object id="MediaPlayer" width="192" height="190" classid="CLSID:22D6F312-B0F6-11D0-94AB-0080C74C7E95"
standby="Loading Windows Media Player components..." type="application/x-oleobject">
<param name="FileName" value="videofilename.wmv">
<param name="ShowControls" value="true">
<param name="ShowStatusBar" value="false">
<param name="ShowDisplay" value="false">
<param name="autostart" value="false">
<embed type="application/x-mplayer2" src="videofilename.wmv" name="MediaPlayer"
width="192" height="190" showcontrols="1" showstatusbar="0" showdisplay="0" autostart="0"> </embed>
</object>"