Dial Up?

[BLiZZaRD]

Okay John, not a whole lot going with the flv for dial up users.

I was able to find this article though. 2 pages of interest.. the one linked, and then in the left menu click on "Preflight Your Movie" Only the first half of that page is what you are after though

Hope it helps!

[jscheuer1]

I took at look at that material and it leads me to believe that if I put the flash on a page that has a lot of other content and have it hidden from view, most of the time it will have a chance to download before the user realizes that it is there and that there is a button to press to see it.

This brings up another problem though. If a thing can be made to appear on a page, it should also be able to be made to disappear. That I can do but, if it is playing, I want it to stop. In Opera and FF all I need to do is set the display property of the embed to 'none' and that takes care of it but, in IE 7 that (setting the object's display property to 'none') just hides it, you can still hear it. I can remove the object from the document but, even that has an unacceptable delay before the music stops.

Now I have seen where you are supposed to be able to grab the object or embed to a variable - say 'movie', and then do:

movie.StopPlay()

But, this seems to have no effect on the playback of the .flv. I am wondering if there is some way I can reach into the flash object with javascript and stop the playback of the .flv - similar to hitting either the pause or stop button on the controls.

If that is possible, I cannot see what to use to do that. I imagine that the information for that (if it can be done at all) would be in the actions. To that end, I am attaching them:

actions.zip

I understand this may be impossible, or too much to ask of you but, if it isn't, I would love to know how to do this. There may even be a simpler way, come to think of it - if I could just come to think of it.

[BLiZZaRD]

I have the zip, I will get the kids off to school and I have to stop by work to handle a few issues. When I return home I will have a look.

[BLiZZaRD]

Okay John (sorry it took longer to get to than I realized)

What I understand is you want a way to stop the movie from playing, and then hide the movie from the view of the visitor?

Sorry I was a bit confused from your post there.

If the movie IS loaded and begins playing, what do you want to stop? I mean, how? Do you want the visitor to decide this or do you want to do this based on some other parameters?

[jscheuer1]

That would be harder to explain than to show. I've updated the page from my first post and it works as desired in FF and Opera:

http://statestreetblues.com/2007/bluesstroll_01b.htm

In IE though, it doesn't. What I use to stop things in FF and O is the display property of the Flash embed. This doesn't work in IE (even when applied to the object element). In IE I remove the object element from the page and store it in a variable using the DOM so I can bring it back if desired. This does stop the audio but only after an unacceptable lag time. I thought that if I could tell the Flash to mute or stop altogether, this would help. Something like:

document.getElementById('movie').SetVariable("sound", 0);

I'm just not sure of what variable(s) I could/should set or if there is more to it than just that. I did try a few simple things and got errors. I then found that fscommand may need to be brought into it and/or even a little bit of visual basic for IE. Ever heard of any of this?

[BLiZZaRD]

Hey John. I see now, that is a lot more clear. Unfortunatley, I do not have the correct answer for you.

Yes you should be able to manipulate the fscommand to pass variables to and from Flash. You can see the explanations here

Alternately, and you would know better than I here, using JS to enable JS?

See if you completely remove the lines:

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" >
<!--
AC_RunFlContentX ("movie", "main", "quality", "high", "src", "main", "width", "450px", "height", "550px" );
//-->
</script>

From the page, the Flash will not show, so perhaps you could have those lines in a .js file instead of on the page and use your button to call or un-call that js file?

Just to give you a couple of ideas Hope it helps, and let me know what you work out. Likewise I will continue the search for a more "perfect" method.

[BLiZZaRD]

I just reread my post and I confused myself... LOL

What I was meaning is make a file, we will call it "active.js"

active.js will include this:

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" >
<!--
AC_RunFlContentX ("movie", "main", "quality", "high", "src", "main", "width", "450px", "height", "550px" );
//-->
</script>

Then on your page you have your button (and I don't know the right code for this, but) it would have something like:

<submit type='button' onclick(include'active.js') value-'show video'>

I know this isn't correct, just trying to get my point across better, don't laugh to hard

[jscheuer1]

For anyone still wondering about this one, I ended up using an iframe to show the Flash in/through from a separate page. When I hide the iframe, I also change its src attribute to about:blank. This kills the Flash playback immediately in all three tested browsers.