I am designing a video player for a client that has a row of thumbs below the main player window. When hovering over any particular thumb, I want a still image (jpg) loaded into the main player window at the size of the video (no resizing needed, the images will be in the same size as the player window).

All of the thumbs will be populated via actionscript/XML. That is no problem for me. However, I am trying to decide which way to lay this out in order to get the best performance. I don't want to make a loadmovie call on the hover, I would rather all the full sized pictures load in as soon as the movie starts loading.

I was thinking of creating a holder movieclip for all the pictures, with each picture residing on it's own frame in the timeline, loaded into an emptyMC at the time the XML file is called. That way rollovers could just call the specific frame in the holder movieclip instead of having to call a loadmovie and wait for the image to load on each rollover.

Is that the best way to do it? Or can someone think of something more ideal?