FLV Cuepoint Advice/ Best Practices Question

[symphy]

Hey all!

In a recent website I'm working on for a client, I've recorded a few transparent videos of the receptionist answering questions -- i.e., if you click "where are you located", the FLVPlayback loads where_are_you.flv.

The problem is, whenever I load a new video to respond to a question, my receptionist cuts out for half-a-second or so as the new video loads in.

I figure there are probably three ways of dealing with this issue, but I'm not quite sure how to implement the best solution, and was wondering what you feel the best practice would be.

1) I could try to preload all the flv questions, but I haven't had much luck with that -- all the preloading flv code I've found here and elsewhere and in Adobe Livedocs just doesn't seem to work.

2) I could try and load all four flvs in their own FLVPlayback areas off-screen, set them all to "pause", and then find a way to programatically swap out one FLVPlayback instance for another and set it to "play".

or

3) I could consolidate all four flvs into one master flv, set actionscript cuepoints, and then for each question, find a way to, say, play 1.350 and stop at 2.565, then play 2.650 and stop at 4.305, etc.

The third option seems like it'd be nice and clean server wise (though there would presumably be a danger if someone with a slower connection clicked the last question first, before the flv had had time to load to that point.) The other issue is that I've never used cuepoints, and am not entirely sure that I'd be able to play "cuepoint 5 through cuepoint 6"... the Livedocs are a little confusing on this point. Also, I know the third option, using Actionscript cuepoints, can only be accurate to the tenth of a second or so, which makes me a little nervous. (Can Adobe Premiere set embedded cuepoints natively?)

Anyway, I'd appreciate any best practices advice one can give me here, and/or suggest something I hadn't thought of!

You guys rock!

[symphy]

p.s. -- I'm outputting to Flash 8, so AS 2.

[dan_hin]

tricky one that. You're right about the 10th of a second issue - I like to leave some room at the top and tail of each clip in order to compensate for this. I don't know if that will be an issue for you.

another option with this - depending on the length of the file/pixel size - is to output an image sequence instead of using a preloaded FLV, and embed that in a movieclip.

just my tuppence!

Dan

[symphy]

What I did was load all the FLVs at once, off stage, and set them to pause, and then when I needed them, I popped them in place and set them to play.

This is still very "in progress", but you can check it out here:

http://*******.com/65bvpv

(High-speed connection probably required).

Works pretty seemlessly so far!

One question, though -- when you click on a button, it stops whatever video is playing, and then plays the one you want. But, if you interrupted one video for another video, and then replay the first video, it starts from the point it left off -- not from the beginning again.

Is there a my_video.rewind() - style command that I can't seem to figure out?

[dan_hin]

seek(0) i think.....

[symphy]

Hey, why on earth did my link get censored???

It's t i n y u r l . c o m ! What's wrong with that? Weird.