For nearly 20 years, Macromedia Director has been the tool of choice for professional multimedia developers. One reason Director has been so successful is that it has continually evolved to meet the needs of content developers. As new multimedia content types emerged, such as QuickTime, RealMedia, and 3D, they were seamlessly added into the Director workflow.

The release of Director MX 2004 introduces DVD-Video playback into the family of more than 40 media types natively supported in Director. What makes this addition so exciting to Director users is the overwhelming popularity of the DVD-Video format.

Requirements

To use the DVD features in Director MX 2004 and the DVD Event Manager, you will need to install the following software and files:

Director MX 2004

• Try
• Buy

Tutorials and sample files:

• dvd_event_manager_v1.zip (1.1 MB)

Introduced in 1997, DVD has become the most quickly adopted format in consumer electronics history. In just six years, DVD has overtaken VHS as the standard consumer video format, leading to a proliferation of low-cost tools to create DVD content. The popularity of DVD-Video goes beyond the Hollywood film titles that ignited its initial success. Educators, corporate presenters, kiosk developers, and others have found the format to be an ideal way to incorporate interactive elements for broad consumption.

Embed, Control, and Play Back

Director MX 2004 offers a wide range of options for DVD playback within Director projectors and Shockwave web projects. Nearly every aspect of DVD playback navigation — including jumping to points of a DVD movie, changing subtitles, and changing angles and audio streams — is supported in authoring and playback. The robust event handlers in Director let developers receive and respond to events that occur during DVD playback. For example, if a user changes the subtitle track of a DVD movie to the French language, the developer can listen for this change and respond by changing all the other elements of the project to French.

Embedding DVD movies inside Director opens up a new paradigm for DVD playback. Rather than playing a DVD from beginning to end, as traditional software DVD players do, Director MX 2004 allows developers to create customized experiences. For example, a developer can segment a movie into custom scenes that include only the sections that appeal to a certain viewer and then link them together into a virtual playlist.

Imagine watching a DVD of the 2004 Super Bowl and at the click of a button being able to view just the touchdowns, skipping over the longer, less exciting sections.

Segmented DVD playback has many uses in education, as well. Educators are increasingly turning to the DVD- Video format to store large amounts of training material. The new DVD capabilities found in Director MX 2004 make it easy for viewers to find and access precisely the content they need.

Say an auto manufacturer creates a training DVD for its service mechanics that contains hours of content. With Director MX 2004, the content creator can create a search field that allows users to skip to just the information they need. If a mechanic wants to find out how to change the battery, for example, by typing change battery, he or she will receive a link that will play only the portion of the DVD movie that demonstrates that task.

Web-Controlled DVD Playback

Since 1999, top Hollywood studios have created web-controlled, interactive DVD content for their top-selling movies. Generally, this interactivity consists of an HTML wrapper around DVD-Video playback that allows users to access special features from within a web browser. For example, the Warner Bros. 1999 release, "The Matrix," included a feature that allowed the viewer to jump directly to a particular scene by clicking on links in the screenplay of the movie.

A new term, WebDVD, was coined to describe the interactivity of Internet control over DVD playback. For the most part, the tools that were used to create WebDVD content were expensive, hard to use, limited to only particular browsers, and didn't work on Macintosh computers.

Through the Shockwave Player, Director MX 2004 enables web-controlled DVD playback and eliminates traditional barriers that have put this type of interactivity beyond the reach of most DVD developers. Shockwave Player 10 supports DVD playback through a wide variety of Internet browsers, including several on Mac OS X.

Using the robust DVD toolset in Director MX 2004, DVD developers can create sophisticated web- controlled DVD projects for a wide variety of usage scenarios. For a distance-learning application, for example, a developer could augment talking head footage found on a DVD with slides or other web-based content, by placing the content inside framed HTML pages. As the DVD movie plays inside a web page, it fires URLs into other frames of the web page at specific times. Since this interactivity is web-based, a content developer can make changes that affect the user experience very quickly.

At the same time, web developers can use the new web-connected DVD features to create custom interfaces. A Flash movie, for example, could contain a text field that could be used to search for interesting events in the DVD movie. A user could type in the name of her favorite actor, for example, to jump to the first scene where he or she appears, then click the Next button to jump to the next occurrence. Because Flash and Director are so closely integrated, the interaction between Flash movies and Shockwave content is seamless.

DVD Event Manager

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Director MX 2004 ships with a Movie In A Window (MIAW) tool called the DVD Event Manager, which greatly reduces the amount of development required to create sophisticated DVD-enabled projects.

The DVD Event Manager automates the process of creating segmented DVD cast members. This is particularly useful if you want to play only certain sections of your DVD movie, or if you want to string together a number of scenes into a custom playlist. Through the use  of its graphical interface, Using the DVD Event Manager’s graphical interface, you can walk through your movie and select in and out points where DVD cast members can appear and disappear. You can also use this tool to set runtime properties, such as default volume and movie size, for each DVD cast member.

As it’s name suggest, the DVD Event Manager can also be used to manage and trigger events that occur when each DVD cast member is playing. For example, you may want to fire off a URL at a particular scene in a movie to provide additional information about that content. This process is greatly simplified with the DVD Event Manager, where you can watch the DVD movie and set the event trigger in one step. The DVD Event Manager can also trigger other types of events. For example, you may want to send messages to other sprites during a particular scene in a DVD movie. The same interface that allows you to fire URLs during DVD playback is also capable of triggering messages to one or all sprites during movie playback.

The DVD Event Manager is located in the Goodies folder of the Director MX 2004 CD, which you can also download at: http://www.macromedia.com/support/director/downloads.html. The DVD Event Manager is an open source project and can be modified freely. You can download the source code for the DVD Event Manager in the sample files linked at the beginning of this article.

Unlimited Possibilities

The marriage of DVD-Video playback with the sophisticated development environment of Director will open the door to exciting new uses for DVD-Video. Learn more about these new capabilities by downloading a 30-day trial version of Director MX 2004.

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