How to pass values from HTML to Flash

There have been a number of ways to do this over the years and over different versions of Flash, but the way to do this today is with FlashVars. What are FlashVars you ask? FlashVars is the name of a parameter that you can pass into your Flash movie, via the 'param' tag.
The value of the parameter is a URL encoded string that contains the name-value pairs you would like to pass in. So, for example,if you would like to pass in a color value, you could do something like this:


<param name="FlashVars" value="ColorValue=0xff0000">