VB program send go to commands to flash movie?

[mgason]

Is it possible to put a flash movie on a form in a VB program?
If so can the VB program then send commands like "go to and play frame x" to the flash movie?

[turoczy]

Yep. It's possible to embed a movie in a VB application via the ActiveX control. The only stipulation is that the end user has to have the control on their machine to see the movie. So, you either have to rely on the fact that they have it, give instructions on how to download it, or distribute the control with your application.

Once it's in there, the object has a series of commands associated with it, just like most objects. For instance, you could set a ShockwaveFlash1.GotoFrame 100, ShockwaveFlash1.Rewind, and so on.

Hope that helps,
Rick

[Hadron]

And it works very well.

You can even fire events in VB from flash!

Private Sub ShockwaveFlash1_FSCommand(ByVal command As String, ByVal args As String)

or have more than one instance of the .ocx on a form and have them talk to one another.

fun stuff.

flash is FUN.

Hell I even heard that FLASH is mentioned in the bible.

bye html

[turoczy]

Now if we could only convince people that VB is fun.

[mgason]

thanks for the info guys

has anyone got any examples of this in action?

mark
PS is the ActiveX control included with flash or do we need to purchase it separately?

[Hadron]

If you are viewing any flash content on the web then you are already infected with the ShockwaveFlash.ocx control and it is ready to use.

Now all you need is Flash 4.0 + in order to create the actual content and that I think was around 350.00 or 399.00 when I bought it. That’s an outstanding deal considering it's potential and flexibility.

[Hadron]

Unless you mean another mark, in which case I spoke out of turn :\

[mgason]

heres the deal guys,
I am a designer and dont know anything about vb and ocx's really.
I work with some programmers in industrial controls software who hardly know what flash is.
Ample room for some cross fertilisation of skills!

meanwhile they are saying where is the active x control for VB, whats the file name, show me something I can drop on a form?

So wheres it at?
I have flash 4 installed on my machine.

thanks guys
PS Hadron, mark was me, guess it was you too, so Hi mark

[Hadron]

Hey mark

It’s called SWFLASH.ocx and you can find it in your windoze/system dir.

If your in a VB project it will show up under the components menu as ShockwaveFlash.

I don’t know if anyone has had a negative experience using flash to build GUIs for VB projects, but I love it.

Flash sure is amazing.

[turoczy]

The only complaint I've had about embedding Flash (in this case, with Powerpoint) is that a) Flash is always on top, even if I send it to back programmatically, and b) I can't seem to get the ActiveX component to support transparency in Powerpoint, even though I attack it programatically.

So long as I'm designing with those two things in mind, I've been very happy with it, as well.

Take care,
Rick

[mgason]

Many thanks guys,
ok I got one of my movies onto a form, and our vb teams eyes lit up when they saw how much better the animation looks in comparison to the old bmp based stuff I did for them years back.

Now can you tell me are there any good resources/tutorials/manuals etc that cover using the control in your project?
The flash manual doesnt seem to mention it.

Mucho thanks again
Mark

[Hadron]

Oh yea I had the same problem in VB. Some controls will stay on top and others will not. That’s okay I guess, there is always some ass pain involved. Have not tried it in pwr point yet.

mgason --

I don’t know of any documents, I had to learn it myself but it was easy if you know a little of both VB and Flash. Let your VB guys play with the flash interface so they can see the theory behind it. If they are pretty good then the .ocx should not give them very many fits. I think you have to know a little about how flash functions internally in order to make good use of the .ocx.

If I find anything useful I will foward it.

[mgason]

OK and thanks, we should be on our way, I have pottered about in VB a long while back and I had one of our VB guys help me with some action script for a personal project, so between us we should be able to get something started.
Im sure we will be back to ask specific questions.
Thanks to all.
Mark

[Hadron]

Do you know of a way to get rid of the "about flash play 4" menu option on the right click event?

[turoczy]

I've only seen third party apps control that, like the Flash Jester stuff. Given that SWF is an open format, it would seem that you could get in there and control that. Of course, it's probably a component of the control and not the movie. Duh.

Nevermind.