An alternative is to play your large video in original quality with fast startup and low CPU/RAM consumtion using third party tools like LPFlashEx.

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.