Using Director > Packaging Movies for Distribution > Previewing a movie in a browser |  |

Previewing a movie in a browser

You can preview a movie in a browser on your local computer to view JPEG-compressed bitmaps, and to check the movie design, Lingo, and any other performance issues related to playing a movie in a browser. Previewing a movie creates temporary Shockwave (DCR) and HTML files that open in a browser.

Note: When you use the Publish command rather than the Preview in Browser command, you can create permanent DCR and HTML files that let you view the movie in a browser.

You may notice that linked media does not work as expected when you preview a movie in a browser. Because of security restrictions, movies playing in browsers cannot read files from a local disk unless they are in the dswmedia folder (also called the support folder), which is by default a subfolder of the folder containing the Shockwave player. However, you can create a dswmedia folder in any location you wish.

Therefore, to preview a movie that uses linked media, you need to put the movie and all of its linked media in a dswmedia folder or in a subfolder of this folder. The movie can open a file in a subfolder of dswmedia provided the relative paths have not changed. If you move the movie and its media to another server, the linked media will continue to work if you preserve the same folder structure. For details about security issues when playing a movie in a browser, see Director and Internet Security in the Director Support Center.

To specify the browser to use for previewing:

1 | Choose File > Preferences > Network.
2 | In the Preferred Browser box, enter the path to the browser application file.

To preview a movie in a browser:

Choose File > Preview in Browser or press F12.