flash (macromedia): I've created a video player that has a "Share" feature allowing folks to embed
it on their own personal pages (mySpace,etc...). I created a custom skin and
am using the FLVPlayback component.

My issue is that even with AutoPlay disabled, the component still
progressively downloads the source FLV even if the user never clicks the Play
button. This means we waste TONS of bandwidth delivery videos (or portions of
videos) to users that never even watch them. I tried not using the load()
method and just setting the source but it still start progressively
downloading. If I don't provide a source, the component displays the ugly
stripped error animation in the seekbar.

How do YouTube, mySpace, imeem, and others do it on their players? Have they
just built their own video players since the FLVPlayback one doesn't have that
feature?

Any ideas appreciated,
William
http://www.williamhaun.com/

Don't give the player a contentPath until the button is clicked.
yourBtn.onRelease = function(){
flvPlyBck.contentPath = "http://www.pathtovideo.com/video.flv";

I can see how this is a problem for William, but is this otherwise a good
feature?

To clarify, does this mean that if I set the Autoplay to false that the video
still loads in the background? Does this allow the video to play quicker
(without undue delay) if the user waits before pressing the play button?

Thanks,

Doug Collins

Then why is William reporting that these videos are being progressively downloaded even though they didn't press play?

Thanks,

Read his post again, taht is not what he is saying. His point is that even when
autoplay is disabled that the file still loads, which is correct. Autoplay is
just a feature that makes the movie start automatically, it has nothing to do
with buffering the video. My only thought is to do what "dzedward" suggested.
I am not sure how to make it so the buffering bar doesn't go goofy, but I'll
play around in flash and see if I can figure out another solution.

Sorry to cause you all to speculate. Let me clarify a couple things:
1) I'm using the CS3 FLVPlayback component that only works in ActionScript3
2) My problem [i]is[/i] that it is progressively downloading in the background
even when "Play" has not been clicked. I'm assuming this is a feature that
normally helps by loading the video so that when you use clicks "Play" it plays
immediately. I want to turn that feature off since our player will be loaded
in lots of pages but the actual number of "plays" will be a small percentage.

So back to my question - Any ideas on how to place the component on the stage
but not have it "preload" the video? Currently if I put the component on the
stage without assigning a video it shows the "buffering/error" bar until I
assign it a video. Then as soon as I assign a video it starts preloading.

if you do what I said, and just place the component on stage, don't give it a
content path until the play button is pressed, then it won't have a video to
preload. All i can think of is, edit the Skin FLA and take out the buffering
bar.