Macromedia FLASH Professional 8: Training from the Source

Chapter 8. Building a Custom Flash Video Player

In Lesson 7, you learned how to use a video component to create a video player. In this lesson, you will build your own video player that doesn’t use components. An obvious question is, “Why bother if I have the components?”

Most Macromedia Flash pros avoid using components because they tend to add “weight” to a SWF file. For example, the player you constructed in the previous lesson had a file size of 34K, plus the skin came in at 15K. In this lesson, you will construct a player with simple Start and Stop buttons that weigh in at 1K. Obviously, one SWF file will load a lot faster than the other and because you are constructing the player, customization is a lot easier to accomplish.

The other factor ...