Adobe® Flash® CS4 Professional Bible

Chapter 16. Displaying Video

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Compressing video in Flash CS4

• Using the Video Import wizard

• Unleashing the FLVPlayback component

• Adding cue points to video clips

• Playing alpha video .flv files

One of the most exciting features introduced with Flash Player 6 was the power to add digital video footage to a Flash movie file (.swf)! Designers and developers alike had long awaited this feature. With Flash Player 6 or later, video encoded with Sorenson Spark codec can be played without relying upon additional browser or system plug-ins such as Apple QuickTime or RealNetworks RealPlayer. Flash Player 7 improved the capabilities and performance of video playback, enabling you to load .flv files directly into Flash movies at runtime from a standard Web server, without the aid of Adobe Flash Media Server. With Flash Player 8, you could take advantage of another video codec, the On2 VP6 codec, which yields better compression (that is, smaller file size) with superior image quality to the Sorenson Spark codec used in Flash Player 6 and 7. With Flash Player 9, the power of full-screen mode was added to present your Flash Video content larger than life! Now, with Flash Player 10, you can deploy video by using the AVC/H.264 video codec and the AAC audio codec — these codecs are among the highest quality codecs available today.

Note

Adobe added the AVC/H.264 and AAC playback capabilities to Flash Player 9.0.115, also known as Flash Player 9 Update 3. That version was made available to the ...