loading movies

[wahardy]

Hello All,

I'm working on a project for a customer who wants to have a flash loading engine that reads flash movie names from a text file and then plays then repeatedly, loading the next movie when the first one is done. Is this possible with flash? I can get this to work using javascript and asp if I use buttons to trigger the events but I've not been very successful without it. Is there a way inside flash to read an external file and load movies in sequential order? If anyone could help or point me in the right direction it'd be great!

Bill

 

[PetitPal]

There is an FAQ by Gasbag which covers loading banner ads from remote files, which sounds pretty much what you want to do. (FAQ 2.a I think !)

This tutorial is for loading files in a random order, but I guess that you can bodge it fairly easily to do it in sequential instead!

=)

PetitPal.

 

[wahardy]

I checked that out and that is kinda what I want. But to give a little more information, he runs a real estate company, and what he wants is when results are returned via searches (2000 sq foot house in this city, etc) on the results page, he wants video walkthroughs of the houses that are a result of the search. So if 5 houses are returned, then out of those 5 houses he wants their movies displayed in a banner type area at the top of the page without people having to click on them to create an "eye-catching" effect that he gets in a magazine type display. People may not be looking for that house but they see it, (if that's at all clear, its kinda like result based advertising). I have added a field to the database with the movie name and I can write that to a text file, but on multiple hit type scenarios I'd hate to be copying the flash files into these file names repeatedly as it could thrash the dickens out of someone's hard drive, so I was hoping to write the temporary text files and have flash read it and load the movies accordingly. Does that make anything like sense? There may be a better way to do this, I'm open to suggestions. I have created link buttons to show the movie when someone clicks on it, but.. the customer also wants this and right now I'm a little stumped.

Thanks,

Bill Hardy

 

[haslo]

Is your movie in a separate frame? You could then pass the filenames via an URL parameter or via hidden form fields or something and read them via loadVariables(...) (ActionScript Reference page 292).
Don't know if I'm completely wrong, I never did that before...

allow thyself to be the spark that lights the fire
haslo@haslo.ch - www.haslo.ch​

 

[wahardy]

Haslo,

No it's not in a frame, but easily could be. I'm still exploring an asp solution. I think I remember something about telling when a movie was done playing. Anyway, thanks for the thought and I'll try to explore that further.

Bill

 

[PetitPal]

It sounds like the movies of the houses that you want to display aren't going to have derived from Flash; they sound more like quicktime/avi/mpeg style videos. If this is the case then you it is fairly pointless trying to do this in Flash (cringes in preparation for abuse for suggesting this about Flash). Using ASP would be a much better solution. There is a really good site called

http://www.4guysfromrolla.com

which has loads of ASP tips and probably has some code for what you are looking for.

=)

PetitPal

 

[wahardy]

PetitPal,

Thanks, Rolla is my neck of the woods actually, and I had forgotten about the site, thanks for reminding me. The walk throughs are a combination of text effects and slide shows, kinda like teasers to the REAL full video walk through. They pop up Great Kitchen with a shot of kitchen, then look at the fireplace, etc....Next to the listing is the full video walkthrough and that I do have coded with java. I keep telling him that the video is just too big for most people to sit and wait for, but.....

Thanks for the help,

Bill Hardy