Re: [Swftools-common] New Project for SWFTOOLS

[Chris Flowers]

> I have been using the swftools and have been very impressed. Something
that
> would really change the way I do things would to create a new project for
> swftools. This new project would consist of the following:
>
> 1. A pre-loader
> 2. A pre-loader progress bar or indicator
> 3. Video navigation controls
>

You can do all of the above through various swftools already.
You can use swfcombine to combine a video.swf and a preloader.swf
or build them from scratch with an swfc script.

Matthias has made one for pdf2swf, I believe.

Preloaders are one of the easiest things to make and are so
commonly asked about that you will find no trouble locating
a tutorial on these around the internet at places like flashkit.com
You'll likely find several free preloaders there as well.

Keep in mind that when dealing with video it is usually better
to design a stand alone player that loads the video.swf externally.
This allows the video to stream versus when embedding the video
inside a player that could lead to preloading the whole video
before playing.

This approach is also useful when you use a program to
batch a large group of videos to swf. You can fine tune the batch settings
without having to re-embed all the videos into individual players each time.

My 2 cents at least...
Chris