A Squeeze Here and There Makes Video in Flash Even Better
Permenant Link To: A Squeeze Here and There Makes Video in Flash Even Better
I'm currently working on a CD-based, Flash product catalog for a friend's business that includes video.
Flash MX's video capabilities were a great addition to Flash, don't you think? But all is not peachy in this Flash video world. Nope!
The main downside to using video is it's file size. A huge video file playing within a Flash projector can bring a computer's memory to its knees, thus causing the projector to stop playing, crash, or some other unpleasant side effect.
Fortunately, workarounds were created to help eliminate, or at least control these types of problems.
The best workaround I have found is in Sorenson Squeeze 3.5 For Macromedia Flash MX. Other than being a great overall application for setting up video content for a Flash project, Squeeze has an awesome feature called stitching, which will automatically take a long/large video file, break it up into sections, and output those sections into a series of SWFs that have built-in programming to play, one-after-the-other. In other words, each outputted SWF contains a section of the movie. Click the initial SWF and it will begin playing the initial section, once it has played through that section, it is unloaded from the Flash player, and the next section is automatically loaded in and begins playing. This gives the seamless appearance of playing back a single movie, even though in the background it's been split up into pieces.
The reason this is so wonderful is because only a limited amount of memory is needed to play each section, as opposed to a bunch of memory if you were to try and load the entire video as a single movie.
Squeeze allows you to configure it's stitching feature to break your movie into sections, based on a specific number of frames, or file size. Thus, if you wanted each section to be 10,000 frames in length, you could choose that. Or you could set it up so that no section would exceed a file size of over 2 megs.
If you're using video in Flash, this is a very handy feature. Thank you Sorenson!
Flash MX's video capabilities were a great addition to Flash, don't you think? But all is not peachy in this Flash video world. Nope!
The main downside to using video is it's file size. A huge video file playing within a Flash projector can bring a computer's memory to its knees, thus causing the projector to stop playing, crash, or some other unpleasant side effect.
Fortunately, workarounds were created to help eliminate, or at least control these types of problems.
The best workaround I have found is in Sorenson Squeeze 3.5 For Macromedia Flash MX. Other than being a great overall application for setting up video content for a Flash project, Squeeze has an awesome feature called stitching, which will automatically take a long/large video file, break it up into sections, and output those sections into a series of SWFs that have built-in programming to play, one-after-the-other. In other words, each outputted SWF contains a section of the movie. Click the initial SWF and it will begin playing the initial section, once it has played through that section, it is unloaded from the Flash player, and the next section is automatically loaded in and begins playing. This gives the seamless appearance of playing back a single movie, even though in the background it's been split up into pieces.
The reason this is so wonderful is because only a limited amount of memory is needed to play each section, as opposed to a bunch of memory if you were to try and load the entire video as a single movie.
Squeeze allows you to configure it's stitching feature to break your movie into sections, based on a specific number of frames, or file size. Thus, if you wanted each section to be 10,000 frames in length, you could choose that. Or you could set it up so that no section would exceed a file size of over 2 megs.
If you're using video in Flash, this is a very handy feature. Thank you Sorenson!
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