Using Director > Playing Movies over the Internet > About streaming movies |  |

About streaming movies

When you distribute a movie on the Internet, streaming provides an immediate and satisfying experience for your users. If you do not specify streaming, your user must wait for the entire movie to download before it begins to play. A streaming movie begins playing as soon as a specified amount of content reaches the user's system. As the movie plays, the remaining content downloads in the background and appears when it is needed. Streaming can dramatically decrease the perceived downloading time.

When Director streams a movie over the Internet, it first downloads the Score data and other nonmedia information such as scripts and the size of each cast member's bounding rectangle. This data is usually quite small compared to the size of the movie's media—usually only a few kilobytes. Before starting the movie, Director then downloads the internal and linked cast members required for the first frame of the movie (or more frames if you have increased the number in the Movie Playback dialog box). After the movie starts, Director continues to download cast members (along with any associated linked media) in the background, in the order the cast members appear in the Score.

If the movie jumps ahead in the Score or uses cast members referenced only by Lingo scripts, the required cast member may not be available when necessary. If cast members are not available, the movie will either ignore them or display a placeholder, depending on how you set the streaming options in the Movie Playback Properties dialog box.

A challenge of authoring for Internet streaming is ensuring all cast members have been downloaded by the time the movie needs them. To avoid missing cast members, make sure that all the cast members required for a particular scene have been downloaded before beginning the scene. You can use Director's behaviors to wait for media in certain frames, or for particular cast members. See About streaming with the Score and behaviors. You can also write your own Lingo code to do the same thing. See Checking whether media elements are loaded with Lingo.

Director movies stream unless you turn off streaming. In addition to turning streaming off and on, you can specify that the media elements for a certain number of frames must finish downloading before the movie starts playing.

You control streaming movies by arranging sprites in the Score and controlling the movement of the playback head either with Director's behaviors or with Lingo. You can also use Lingo to specify when externally linked files are downloaded.