Flash Preloading

[willntae]

I have a site at http://www.hiyah.net/software.html that offers free applications to teach children numbers and words. I have recently converted all the powerpoint presentations into flash movies so the users can now play them online instead of downloading the whole package. The problem is it takes too long for the movie to load and it doesnt start playing until the whole movie is loaded. Any Ideas on how to make these work faster?

[Medyman]

First, read these articles:
Flash Performance by Scott Bilas (http://www.flashmagazine.com/tutorials/detail/flash_performance/)
Secrets for Optimizing Flash Performance by Derek Thorslund (http://community.citrix.com/display/~derekt/2007/11/27/Secrets%20for%20Optimizing%20Flash%20Performance%20-%20Part%201;jsessionid=a9A6H3Yo26k-gxS5PM)

Next, as your topic title says, you should preload your movie. There are some great video tutorials at gotoandlearn.com that will help you out here. There are the links:
http://gotoandlearn.com/player.php?id=18
http://gotoandlearn.com/player.php?id=19

I see a loading message when I try to view one of your movies but I'm not sure if it's a true preloader or not.


Without knowing more about how these movies are set up, I can't offer any more guided advice. The only way to reduce load time is to get as many things of the timeline as you can. If each of your slides is an image on the timeline, you can move those images outside of flash and call them dynamically. That would greatly reduce your load times.