Loading external movies

i am currently building an interactive cd with flash content and 2 five-minute videos that play at points in the flash content.

what is the most effective way to play these long video files (note...each video file is a cg animation and it is rendered in targa frames and can be exported as any video or swf extension in after effects)

my first guess is to save the video files as swfs and plop them on to the cd with the exported exe projector. but what is the code to load an external movie...and can i have control of the video (play pause rew ff??)

note... i am a beginner, and the in-depth explanation of this process would be more valuable to me than a quick answer.

thanks again all!

You have a couple of options. First tell what version of flash your using, mx, mx 04, F8?

Then, keep in mind that there is no preloading or streaming of any kind from a CD. All files you load to the exe will have to load completely before they will play. If the movies are really big, like over 20mb or so, they can take an appreciable amount of time. Up to 20 seconds or so, depending on the computer, the CD drive, the amount of RAM and so on.

When external files are called to load with loadMovie, first, the CD drive has to spin up, the particular file has to be found, then download to RAM. This is the time lapse. Depending on the overall size of the complete presentation, it might be faster to build everything inside the one exe and call content from the library.

im using

flsh mx 2004 and the movie files are prob. pretty big

if they load from the library do i need a preload component?

No, preloaders don't work at all from a CD. But, if you build everything inside the exe, it will load before it plays. That way, if the video is in the library, it's already loaded to RAM with the rest of the movie and will load with little or no delay.

But, that requires that the computer have some fairly hefty RAM, like 512Mb or a Gig or more, not some old 32mb. LOL