FLVPlayback Component

The FLVPlayback component lets you easily include a video player in your Flash application to play progressively downloaded Flash video (FLV) files over HTTP or play streaming FLV files from a Flash Media Server (FMS) or from a Flash Video Streaming Service (FVSS).

NOTE

A FLVPlayback component is supported for both ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0. This document discusses the version 2 component. If you are using the version 3 component, see Using the CheckBox in Using ActionScript 3.0 Components.

The easy-to-use FLVPlayback component has the following characteristics and benefits:

Can be dragged to the Stage and implemented quickly and successfully
Provides a collection of predesigned skins that allow you to customize the appearance of its playback controls
Allows advanced users to create their own skins
Provides cue points that allow you to synchronize your video with text, graphics, and animation
Provides live preview of customizations
Maintains a reasonably sized SWF file

The FLVPlayback component includes the FLV Playback Custom UI components. The FLVPlayback component is a combination of the display area, or video player, in which you view the FLV file and the controls that allow you to operate it. The FLV Playback Custom UI components provide control buttons and mechanisms that you can use to play, stop, pause, and otherwise control the FLV file. These controls include the BackButton, BufferingBar, ForwardButton, MuteButton, PauseButton, PlayButton, PlayPauseButton, SeekBar, StopButton, and VolumeBar. The FLVPlayback component and the FLV Playback Custom UI controls appear in the Components panel, as shown in the following figure:

The process of adding playback controls to the FLVPlayback component is called skinning. The FLVPlayback component has an initial default skin, ClearOverPlaySeekMute.swf, that provides transparent controls for the play, seek, and mute functions. To change this skin, you have the following choices:

Select from an collection of predesigned skins
Select individual controls from the FLV Playback Custom UI components and customize them
Create a custom skin and add it to the collection of predesigned skins

After you select a different skin, the selected skin becomes the new default skin.

For more information about selecting or creating a skin for the FLVPlayback component, see Customizing the FLVPlayback component.

The FLVPlayback component also includes an ActionScript application programming interface (API). The API includes the FLVPlayback, VideoError, and VideoPlayer classes. For more information on these classes, see FLVPlayback class, the VideoPlayer class, and the VideoError class.

FLVPlayback Component

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