Using Director > Director basics > About distributing movies |  |

About distributing movies

When you finish creating a movie, you have several choices about how to distribute it to users. You can distribute the movie as a Shockwave movie that plays within a Web page or as a projector that downloads to the user's computer or that you distribute on a disk.

| A Shockwave movie is a compressed version of the movie data only.
| A projector is a stand-alone version of a movie. You can include several movies in a single projector. Projectors appear on the system desktop as applications.

For more information about distributing movies, see Packaging Movies for Distribution overview.

Movies distributed from the Internet can begin playing as soon as the content for the first frame is downloaded. This is called streaming. You can control streaming with behaviors that make the movie wait for media at certain frames, or you can specify that a movie download completely before it begins playing. See Setting movie playback options.

To create a Shockwave movie that can play in a Web page, you use the Publish command. Director leaves your original movie in its DIR format. Director also creates a Shockwave movie in the DCR format.

If you use the default Publish settings, Director creates an HTML page completely configured with `EMBED` tags and everything else you need to run your movie in a browser. Director saves all of these new files, by default, in the same folder as your original Director movie. For more information about putting your Director movie on the Web, see Creating Shockwave movies.

For information on how to distribute Xtras with projectors, refer to TechNote 13965 in the Director Support Center. Although the note may refer to Director 7, the information is the same for Director 8.