Subtitles of the Movie

One of Macromedia's most often requested features has always been video support. This is a very tall order to deliver on as most video player's plug in download size is anywhere from one to six megabytes; And a Flash player has always prided itself on being less than 400K. Many people felt that to include video in the Flash player would simply be impossible if Macromedia was to keep the player size small, which was the primary goal for the player. Third party developers knowing that the demand is great, created products to simulate video in Flash 5, such as wild form flix, which exported a series of JPEG images which could be imported into Flash's timeline and there by simulate the video. The problem however was that the audio would not always sync up with the video and it was exported as a separate MP3 channel and this caused more problems than it solved. Macromedia finally delivers on the longstanding request with a whole new approach to video, the video object. So we can now say that Macromedia finally offers video support in their Flash MX product. Flash MX is now a multimedia application that can deliver much more than just simple graphics and vector images. The Flash player 6 now supports true embedded video content all on a player size that's only 400k. Most users already have the Flash player installed and to be able to support video, they'll need to get the Flash player 6. What this means to you the developer is that you now have the freedom to use video in your application without having to worry about cross platform issues such as quick time, downloads and Window's media player and other various formats which don't always work from platform to platform. The best part about this is that Flash MX can do more than just your average video player as well by harnessing the power of action script and the options placed on the stage; Flash MX can do what no other video player can do and that is provide complete interactivity. In later chapters we'll dive into the many ways that you, the Flash developer, can take advantage of this new and exciting tool. But without getting too complicated at this point, let's see a few examples of using Flash video. Our first example we are going to look at a video clip of the space shuttle undocking from the Mir space station. Imagine this is a part of NASA training series or a promotional clip on their website. This video clip is playing through the Flash player as you can see when you click play. This is not an external plug in, this is not windows media player or any other third party plug in, this is simply the Flash player 6 playing back an embedded video stream which we imported from a quick time movie. Using this component control down here, you can see that I can easily control the time frame. I can send it all the way back to the beginning, I can scrub through the timeline using this component right here and I can set it to loop to play again and again. This is a component; this is a reusable component and one that I'll show you how to use in in the later chapter. Suffice it to say this whole video was imported, dropped into the timeline; I took this component, dropped it also onto the timeline and the two linked up and I was able to use it all without any action script. That's a simple demonstration of the power of components as we'll discuss throughout this entire tutorial. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Macromedia is always showcasing new and exciting ways of using their products and the launch of their contribute software was no exception. I'll go ahead and close this and we'll switch over to the Macromedia website and take a look at their contribute demonstration. Notice on the WebPage it looks like just a simple graphic. There are three buttons- one, two and three; each one of these contains a link. We'll look at the first one by clicking; now watch closely as the video begins to fade in as it's loading and playing as soon as it's done loading. Now the point of this is not to show you the contribute product so much as it is to look at how Macromedia has raised the bar on embedded video. Macromedia has done two things here with this demo which have not been done before. First of all notice that you do not have to launch a separate window to view the video. You may also have noticed that the video clips were layered over the background text; notice it came in on top of his quote and in front of his title. The clip began to play after fading in using the alpha channels and showing you the loaded progression as well. Recall from our NASA demo that it was pretty standard stuff, video and a rectangle; real player, quick time and windows media players have being doing this for years. But this application of video opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Since this is just an introduction of some of the new features in Flash MX we'll save the more in-depth discussion of Flash's support for video until a later chapter. Suffice it to say video is big and now that it is included with the Flash player 6 expect to see more and more sites taking advantage of it in the near future. chapter. Suffice it to say video is big and now that it is included with the Flash player 6 expect to see more and more sites taking advantage of it in the near future.