[thelist] flash movie controls

John Dowdell jdowdell at adobe.com
Tue Aug 28 15:02:39 CDT 2007


Birdie wrote:
> I have a series of .swf files that are displayed on a website. These are
> made by the client with a third party piece of software, not flash. All I
> get is a SWF file.
> All is fine and dandy with embedding them in the HTML page.
> However the client would like them to have playback controls like pause,
> play, rewind, etc, just like the control bars on windows media player or
> quicktime.
> Is that possible when embedding a swf file ? I have googled for parameters
> for flash player but have not found anything similar to other media players
> that you use in the embed code.

If you're asking "What's an easy way to add playback controls to a Flash 
video?" then there are many, many pre-existing skins available... just 
point whichever skin to your video in its markup and you're good to go. 
Search term "flash player video" pulls up a wide array of contributions, 
free for your own reuse. (No SWF authoring skills of your own are needed.)

Hmm, but you mentioned SWF, not FLV... maybe the actual question is 
closer to "If my client makes SWFs with software which doesn't include 
the UI elements they desire, how can I help them?" That situation may be 
trickier, because they didn't actually make the SWF they want. Most of 
the video skins won't be looking at accepting SWF, because it's such a 
rare situation to make a SWF that isn't the SWF you actually want.

If you advertise for a consultant, it might be good to give them a clue 
what SWF-maker your client used... depending on what was put inside that 
file, it might be easy to modify, or might be hard.


In a different topic in this thread Bob Meetin wrote:
 > Do you have experience with streaming Flash because I've been
 > converting QT movies using Flash CS3 Professional and whatever
 > I do the quality is not what I need.

"Streaming" may be an incidental adjective in there, or it may not... it 
sounds like you're talking about recompressing previously-compressed 
video assets, which is always delicate. It's easier to compress from the 
original source files. Recompression is possible (look at YouTube, eg), 
but high-quality results are usually easier from video files which don't 
already contain compression artifacts.

jd




-- 
John Dowdell . Adobe Developer Support . San Francisco CA USA
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