To clarify, I happens in all browsers, and it's only on the still image. It goes away as soon as you start playing the video, and from that point forward everything works great.

After a little more troubleshooting, this happened when I was running the page in a WAMP stack on Windows XP Pro 64 bit. When I moved the page to a linux machine, the blue box now takes up the entire image behind the play button. So, this seems to be caused by the poster image feature. I am currently not using a post-image, but it's defaulting to this blue box. I'll keep playing around to see what I can find, but any other help or suggestions would be appreciated.

Alright, I figured it out, sorry for starting a post where I'm just talking to myself, but I tweaked the code, so maybe this change can go into the next version. As it is, in the current version of flv() and flvstring(), there is no parameter to pass in the newly added "postimage" variable. When run as is, I get the blue box. I went in an manually added a post image, so for example, in line 104 of flvstring(), I added &postimage=http://localhost/postimage.jpg after the FlashVars string, which read movie=$movie&$options. So my version read movie=$movie&$options$postimage=http://localhost/postimage.jpg. This worked, loading postimage.jpg behind the play button. I then went back and changed it again to movie=$movie&$options&postimage=. Leaving a blank value for postimage got rid of the blue box. Thus, in the next version, I think you should add parameters to flv() and flvstring() for postimage, with the defualt value being and empty string. Then, add one more conditional in flvstring() to add the postimage value to the $options array before imploding it. I would be happy to send you the flash.php I've come up with, let me know.

Thanks,
Trevor

Correction, by empty string I meant a single space, so I have $postimage default to $postimage=' '

thanks for your help on this issue Trevor.