Adobe® Flash® CS3 Professional Bible

Chapter 17. Displaying Video

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Compressing video in Flash CS3

• Using the Video Import wizard

• Unleashing the FLVPlayback component

• Adding cue points to video clips

• Using Sorenson Squeeze

• Creating 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 higher, video can be played without relying upon additional browser or system plug-ins such as Apple QuickTime or Real Systems RealOne player. 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 Flash Communication Server. With Flash Player 8, you could take advantage of a new 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. Now, with Flash Player 9, you can leverage the power of full screen mode to present your Flash Video content larger than life!

Note

You learn more about the capabilities of the On2 VP6 codec later in this chapter.

Adobe has added more tools to make it easier for you to integrate video into your Flash movies. In this chapter, we show you how to perform a wide range of video procedures, from importing a source clip to playing the video clip within the FLVPlayback ...