Subtitles of the Movie

In this tutorial we're going to look at one simple way of creating a SWF that loads an External Video using Progressive Download, and we're going to do this with a component, a reusable packaged module that adds a particular capability to a Flash document, and the component we're going to use is a Playback component, a component designed to play video. First, let's talk a little bit about Progressive Download and the other alternative way of loading an External Video file, which is Streaming. With Progressive Download, basically the player just downloads the video file the same way it would download any other file, starting with the first byte and loading and loading and loading. But, it can start to play the file before it's completely downloaded, so maybe it'll cache the first 10 seconds or 20 seconds or whatever, and then start to play, and meanwhile, it's still downloading. The advantages of Progressive Download versus Streaming are: hosting costs are less, you can have a single Internet Service Provider for both Web and Video; that's convenient. Disadvantages are you can only fast forward to frames that have already been downloaded and remember it's just downloading from the first frame to the end in order. So when you first load the video you couldn't fast forward, say, to the end of it. Possibly not even to the middle, just depending on how much of the video was initially cached. And also, the FLV is cached locally on the hard disk, so potentially the user could access your FLV and perhaps use it for some other purpose. So if you want to protect your content Progressive Download may not be the ideal way to go. With Streaming on the other hand you can immediately fast forward to any frame as soon as the video starts to play. The video also starts playing more quickly and the FLV is not cached locally so that gives you some protection for your content. It does tend to be more expensive and you need a specialized Streaming Service Provider that has a video server such as the Flash Media Server, or of course, you could implement your own Flash Media server. OK. So, let's set up a Progressive Download. I've already got a layer here called player, that's where I'm going to create my video player component. So I go to File, Import, and Import Video. Load external video with playback component Ð so that's the component I was talking about. Browse for the file, here it is. And that's all we need to do there. Go to Next. Now here we get to choose a Skin for the component, and the skin determines the appearance of the controls, the color for example, which controls appear, and also where they appear whether it's right over the video, on top of the video, or under the video. So, we have a whole list of skins that we can choose. Let me just pull this up so you can see the whole list. So, for example, all these SkinOver options put the controls over the video. All the SkinUnder options put the controls under the video. So, I'm just going to choose SkinOverPlay. That just gives me a Play-Pause button, and go to Next. Now it tells me what I've chosen and I can click Finish. It's getting metadata, which is just some information about the file, and that's all there is to it. This is the component. So, let's just try testing this. And there's the video. It starts playing automatically. I can Pause it, and I can Play it. Now one of the advantages of using a component is that even after I've created this I can go back and change the parameters of the component. So, for example, I can go to Windows, Component Inspector. Here it gives me various parameters of this component, so here for example, I can see that I chose SkinOverPlay. I could go here and it brings me right back to the Select Skin and I could choose another skin. Here I could change the color. Here I could change the transparency of that skin. I can even change which file I'm accessing. So, this is a very flexible approach to creating a video player. That's one of the advantages of components. And that concludes this tutorial on creating a Progressive Download.