Megan — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 17:11:26 +0000

Flash comes with a bunch of pre-made templates that you can use. These include slideshows, presentations, web advertising and things like that. I thought I saw a video player in there once but it's not there now so maybe I was imagining things. There might be some other stuff in the behaviors or something...

You could also try looking for one online. If you had an already working .fla file it would save you a lot of trouble creating the functions yourself. Someone I used to work with created a flash player and it was a real pain in the a$$ (it had some additional complexity built in though...). I don't know if I would recommend attempting to build a player from scratch if you haven't done any scripting before. It would be fine if you just wanted it to do simple things like play and stop but if you wanted something more complex (like, say, a volume control), you could run into problems.

LenBradshaw — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 16:06:32 +0000

SwishMAX is the Swishzone product that creates Flash files. And yes, it has it's own scripting language that gets converted to Macromedia's Action Script upon exporting the SWF file. Megan, what do you mean by "pre-made player"? If you're referring to a set of controls, another product by Swishzone is Swish Video2 which converts almost any video file into a compressed FLV file. It also outputs an SWF file with a choice of several different controllers for your movie. There are also instructions on how to create your own custom controller for SWF movies. By the way, I DON'T work for that company. I only started learning about web design a little over 2 years ago and I had tried to learn Macromedia Flash. UGH! The help files were horrible, so I downloaded the 15 day trial of SwishMAX and I couldn't believe how much easier it was to learn. Their website has TONS of tutorials and free snippets of code submitted by users from around the world. Finally, it still does do "cheesy" text animations, but they barely scratch the surface of the power the program has. It's so inexpensive that I bought it 2 days into 15 day trial.

Megan — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 14:00:47 +0000

Swishzone does Actionscript???? Wow. I'm still thinking of swish as something that just does cheesy text animations. Of course, that was back in 1999.

I think Flash comes with a pre-made player which you could modify for your own site. Swish could do, I don't know...

Lithium — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 13:42:24 +0000

thanks for everyones input, i appreciate it SwishZone looks like what I'm looking for.

timjpriebe — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 07:23:50 +0000

I have to second Len. I have SwishZone and Flash, and don't bother using Flash, just SwishZone. It outputs Flash files, it's just much easier and more intuitive to learn. And cheaper, as Len mentioned.

LenBradshaw — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 05:47:51 +0000

I recommend something much easier to learn and use than Macromedia Flash, and much less expensive: http://www.swishzone.com/index.php

Greg K — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 19:18:42 +0000

You will most likely need need Flash 8 Professional (or MX2004 Professional) for that. List price for version 8 is $699.

If it is small changes, maybe contact he people who made the fee one you use and see if you can just pay them a small fee to modify it to how you like.

-Greg

Lithium — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 16:24:27 +0000

Megan;212805 wrote: A flash player to play what? You are not thinking of re-writng the software, surely.

i'm sorry, i should've gone into more detail.

i want it to play my radio show. i have a free one but i'm not happy with the way it looks. i want to employ my own logo and what have you, in order to make it blend with my site more. am i making sense? :blush:

Megan — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 16:10:31 +0000

A flash player to play what? You are not thinking of re-writng the software, surely.