Flash MX with Video vs. Director

[Tazmania]

I have used Director to create interactive CD's that include video. Problem I run into is that if the user does not have Quicktime, the video does not work.
Would I have that problem with Flash MX? I would prefer to create the content for the Cd's in flash anyways. Just need to know if it is worth me purchasing or will I still need Director?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Taz

[enpstudios]

If you embed your movie inside of Flash, then publish as a .swf, All they need is the flashplayer. Unless you publish as a projector, then they need nothing.

[Justmade]

If you movie is not big, importing to flash is a good choice. However if they are big, you are better stick with director or use some third party tools to play them.

You may want to have a look at the following samples :
http://www.lpflashex.com/dl/MovieSamplesV2.zip (161KB)

There are 5 samples in the file
You can start test with publishing MovieMouseClick.fla or MMPMouseClick.fla to EXE which shown some more advanced functions. When looking at sources code, you can start with the 2 simple one first.

ChooseMovie.fla show how to write code that support both media playing engin LPFlashEx provided and let user (or your action script code) to choose at run time.

The two engin :
Movie (using Window Media Player OCX) is well testing and used by our many customer. Some also send their production using LPFlashEx for Lab test in over 20 computers with different OS (95/98/Me/2K/XP) and different hardware and scored 100% pass without any error / warning. Media Player 6.4 + is needed to play movie this way. You can use the OCX detection event to prompt user to install Media Player using your included installer or use LPFlashEx download action to download installer from Microsoft. You can see this in MovieMouseClick.fla.

MMP is a newer engin which make direct call to system to let it play media with whatever codec it got so it dont depend on a specific program. For example, if the user had any program that registered it codec to playback mpg file with system, MMP should be able to play it. It also support Audio CD playback and we may act more support to it later such as sound recording.

If you need more info or have any questions. You are welcomed to visit our web site and email me.

[CNO]

Originally posted by estudioworks
If you embed your movie inside of Flash, then publish as a .swf, All they need is the flashplayer. Unless you publish as a projector, then they need nothing.

Exactly. Unlike Director, which required a video Xtra or callout to Quicktime, the Flash player has the video codec built-in to process video encoded in the proper format (.swf or .flv).

[Jonathan_B]

Hi.
You can use MX video for CDs and get a great result. If you create a projector the end user will not need any additional software to play the video.
There are a couple of issues to keep in mind:
Because of the way Flash works, when you have a SWF on CD, the Flash player loads the entire file into memory before it starts to play. So, depending on your computer's speed, ram, CD player speed, etc. your performance may vary. Consequently, we suggest not creating files larger than 25MB for use on a CD Rom. You can get around this limit by chaining your video swf's and loading them sequentially. Our software, Flix Pro, can do this for you automatically.
Also, if you're going to make Mac projectors, you need to allocate enough RAM to your projector. When preparing a CD-ROM, the projector file needs to be allocated it's own size plus the biggest Flix file plus a couple of extra MB to be on the safe side. When the HFS volume is burnt onto CD it will inherit the memory settings you've specified.
jb

http://www.wildform.com/flix

[Tazmania]

Thanks for all the great advice. Sounds like I will be purchasing Flash MX in the very near future.

Taz