Clint Modien wrote: > Can I start playing the movie before it's loaded? The question is actually harder to answer than it might seem, because SWF has added more capabilities and content types since it started.
Here's a good intro to the basic streaming nature of a SWF file, written towards Flash 4/5 days: http://www.macromedia.com/support/flash/how/subjects/Stream1/ For basic SWF a movie will start to display as soon as the first frame is loaded... the second frame will display immediately if it has no new media, or (if the second frame has new media) after the second frame's media has downloaded. Generally, Flash is set up to start playing "in a Flash". It gets harder if you're using elements which can be called at any time during play (attachMovie, attachSound, etc) because these elements then need to be front-loaded, and need to be completely downloaded before the *chance* that they might be called in the first frame. Components generally fall into this class as well. The video features add another complication to "is it streaming"... we can set up video to download entirely before playing, to stream from a server, more: http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/flash/articles/flv_download.html One useful strategy for many cases where a 13-megabyte SWF is considered would be to break the presentation into modules which can then be called on demand. If everything was in a single 13M SWF then you might have to download the bulk of it before seeing anything interesting (depending on how it was constructed), but if there's 2M for a map module, another 4M for a voice-over and so on, then you can load these assets as they're requested and speed the immediate startup of the piece for your audience. Easier question to ask than to answer, sorry, but does the above provide a path for what you wish to achieve...? jd -- John Dowdell . Macromedia Developer Support . San Francisco CA USA Weblog: http://www.macromedia.com/go/blog_jd Aggregator: http://www.macromedia.com/go/weblogs Technotes: http://www.macromedia.com/support/ Spam killed my private email -- public record is best, thanks. -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
