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Why doesn't my video play?

Most of the time your video doesn't play because it's not encoded in the right format. Videos have containers like mp4, mov, ogv, mkv, flv, etc and within those containers there are video and audio codecs like H.264, MPEG-4, VP8, etc. The best option for this plugin is an mp4 container with H.264 video and AAC audio. mp4s with MPEG-4 video will not play in the Flash player, and if you don't use AAC audio you won't get any audio.

If you recorded the video using a Samsung Galaxy S II phone, even though most programs will tell you it's H.264 video with AAC audio, there's a good chance that it's actually recorded in 3gp4 format, which won't work with the Flash player. Use MediaInfo Library to get really detailed information about your media files.

The Strobe Media Playback Flash player will not play mp4/m4v/mov files that don't have the MooV atom at the head of the file. FFMPEG puts the moov atom at the end of the file, so this can be a problem. The plugin will fix this problem on newly encoded H.264 videos if you have qt-faststart or MP4Box installed on your server.

Why doesn't this work with YouTube?

WordPress already has a built-in system for embedding videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc. Just put the URL into your post and WordPress will automatically convert it to an embedded video using oEmbed. You don't need this plugin to do that. If you're trying to generate new thumbnails from YouTube videos, I'm not going to risk Google's wrath by providing that functionality. I'm not even sure I could figure out how to do it anyway.

I'm on shared hosting and can't install software. Does this work without FFMPEG?

Many of the features of the plugin will work without FFMPEG. You can generate embed shortcodes for your videos on any host because that part of the plugin is JavaScript running in your browser. But without FFMPEG you won't be able to generate thumbnails or encode alternate formats. There is no way around this. A program has to read the video files in order to generate the thumbnails, and FFMPEG is the best one I've found to do that. Dreamhost is one of the few shared hosts I know of that has FFMPEG installed and available for users.

How can I encode videos in directories protected by .htaccess passwords?

Use the "Embed from URL" tab. Use the format http://username:password@yourdomain.com/uploads/2012/01/awesomevid.mp4 in the Video URL field.