Learning ActionScript 3.0

Chapter 12. VIDEO

Video playback is largely responsible for dramatic increases in Flash use over the past few years, and it’s not hard to understand why. Flash not only offers an easy entry into video delivery with components (precreated collections of user interface assets and ActionScript), but it also provides extensive control over nearly every aspect of video playback. This simultaneous ease of use and control, added to the video quality and pervasiveness of Flash Player, has made Flash video (FLV) one of the most attractive video delivery formats available.

While we won’t be able to cover every aspect of FLV development, we will concentrate on a variety of ways to present video, as well as cover some key new features introduced in Flash CS3. In this chapter, we’ll discuss:

• Encoding. The scope and size of this book doesn’t allow us to delve extensively into Flash video encoding, but a little background will be enough to get you started and will be useful when discussing captioning with cue points—video time markers that can contain additional information and that can be inserted during encoding.

• Components. It’s very easy to get going with Flash video by using the FLVPlayback component. We’ll explore components further when discussing full-screen video and captions.

• Full-screen Video. The Flash engineers have made full-screen video a very simple effect to achieve. We’ll discuss the steps required to present your video in a true full-screen environment, where your video fills the ...