Flex 3 Cookbook

Chapter 8. Images, Bitmaps, Videos, Sounds

Images, bitmaps, videos, and sounds is a mouthful and a far wider range of topics than could be adequately covered in a single chapter, so this one concentrates on answering the most common questions. As Flash becomes the primary method of delivering video over the Internet and the use of the Flex Framework in creating photo and MP3 applications increases, understanding how to work with all of these elements becomes more and more important.

The Flash Player offers multiple levels of tools for dealing with images and sound. The first avenue of control contains the Image and VideoDisplay classes, MXML classes that simplify much of dealing with images and video and enable you to quickly integrate these assets into your application. The next step down is the flash.media package, which houses the Video, Sound, SoundTransform, Camera, and Microphone classes; their corollaries, Loader, NetConnection, and NetStream, are in the flash.net package. These classes provide much finer control over the integration of sound, video, and images into an application and require slightly more time to perfect. Finally, you can reach down to the bytes of data in the Flash Player: the BitmapData classes and the ByteArray classes. These classes enable you not only to manipulate the bitmap data of the images that you load into the Flash Player, but they also let you create new bitmaps and stream the data out.

Many of the examples in this chapter manipulate images and ...