Playing a movie in reverse

[jfred1979]

I have an FLV that is embedded on the timeline and I'm trying to allow the user to scrub it in reverse by pressing a button. Basically the actionscript just subtracts one frame from the movie's _currentframe property every time a button is pressed. This works fine, but it seems to play slower in reverse than it does when I use the same approach to play it forwards. It seems to jitter and be much less responsive. Is there a way to do this smoothly?

[Two Bass Hit]

You shouldn't embed FLV's. The whole point of an FLV is 'play on demand' as opposed to loading a huge file embedded in your swf. Try keeping the FLV external from your main swf and then see if you have the same problem.

[jfred1979]

It's a tiny movie, the whole swf once it is exported is no bigger than 5 megs, and this is for a kiosk, not delivery on the web. If anything I would think that loading an external movie would hurt the performance rather than help it, unless I'm missing something in the way Flash deals with external video files...

[Two Bass Hit]

the whole swf once it is exported is no bigger than 5 megs

That's considered very large for a swf file, and is precisely why the FLV format exists. Basically, you convert your video (quicktime, wmv or whatever) to a FLV. Then using actionscript, you stream the FLV through a swf "shell". The video is not actually loading in the same way a regular swf would load, it streams like quicktime, etc. It makes a world of difference. Even on a kiosk, you can still load an external FLV from a swf file. The FLV will simply be a file uploaded onto the HDrive of your kiosk. You should really check out [gotoandlearn.com....] It has excellent, free tutorials on using FLV.

[jfred1979]

Thanks for the tips, I'll check out the links and experiment with streaming the flv from the hard drive....

[jfred1979]

Thanks a lot for the link by the way, I looked into streaming video and the performance is much better. Just what I needed.