Okay, chalk it up to advancing years, memory leaks in my brain, or whatever. I just checked my lecture notes, and indeed I did teach the 'start player' form, which is correct. The erroneous 'play player' form always gives the result indicated in my original post--the phantom "text track" thingy shows up in the middle of the screen. I guess the thing that threw me was my student used the incorrect 'play player' form in his script, and when I looked at it, the command looked fine to my eyes. Flashback to an old HyperCard trip?

So never mind, move along, nothing to see here. Go back to your snickering.

Red faced,

Devin

On Mar 31, 2005, at 9:16 AM, I impetuously wrote:

Okay, yesterday was a reality check for me. Since time immemorial, I have believed that 'play player "myPlayer"' and 'start player "myPlayer"' were synonymous. It may be a relic of using the old HC QuickTime external, when you used 'play movie' to start playing an external movie file. Regardless of the source, I have happily been using play player, and teaching it to my students, since Rev 1.0 ***BECAUSE IT WORKED***. Until this week. One of my students showed me a weird problem where his movie would sort of start playing--it would show a still frame of the beginning of the movie, plus pop up a text track movie that contained the name of the player object in the center of the stack window, which then would disappear. I couldn't figure out what was causing this, and finally I resorted to the dictionary to reread the play command entry, which I had read dozens of times. This time it struck me: this command has nothing to do with player objects. It is only the start command that pertains to playing movies inside players.

I suppose this could all be considered a morality play on the dangers of depending on old habits. ;-)

But now the question remains: Why does the play player form even work at all? Does it somehow resolve the reference in the player object as a virtual imported video file?

Confused,

Devin Asay
Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
Brigham Young University

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Devin Asay
Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
Brigham Young University

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