Developing Android Applications with Adobe AIR

Playing Video

You can play videos running from your device or loaded remotely.

Embedded Video

You can embed a video in your application using Flash Professional. Embedded video will appear in the library as a symbol. Create a MovieClip and add the video content to it. You can then control its playback by calling the standard MovieClip navigation methods.

Using this approach is simple, but it has disadvantages. The video is compiled into the application and adds to its size. Also, it is always loaded in memory and cannot be removed.

As an alternative, you can embed the video in an external .swf file which you load using the Loader class.

External Video

You can package the video with your application. It is placed in the application directory. The application will not display until all of the assets are loaded. You can also serve the video from a remote web server. The code is identical in both cases.

For the latter, add some buffering logic. We will come back to this topic later in this chapter.

Progressive Video

To load video locally, you need to know the path of the file in your application directory.

NetConnection creates a connection with the local filesystem when calling its connect method. Pass a null parameter in its construction to indicate that it is not streaming.

Within the connection, NetStream opens the channel between AIR and the local filesystem. Pass the connection object as a parameter in its construction, and use its play method to receive video data. Note that this object ...