After much fiddling I found out that you can pass variables to flash directly in the HTML embed code of the webpage. For example:

<embed src="flash.swf?var1=var1;var2=var2" quality="high" pluginspage=
+"http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-sho
+ckwave-flash"></embed>
[download]

A working version of this can be found here.

Have fun! :-)

- wil