Movie Playback Methods

You can play MacroMind Director movies by doing the following:

Using the MCI animation commands

Using the Movie Player functions

The following illustration shows the different ways your application can access the Movie Player:

The method you use depends on the amount of control you want over playback. MCI provides the easiest way to play movies.

Summary: Playback Using MCI Command Messages

Using MCI commands, your application can supply a movie filename with the MCI_OPEN command message and then send an MCI_PLAY command message to start playback. Using the MCI Multimedia Movie Driver (hereafter called the MCI Movie Driver), you can do the following:

Start the Movie Player and load a movie file

Play a movie file from start to finish or through a range of frames; play forward or reverse; play fast or slow; step frame by frame; stop and restart playback; and receive notification when playback is complete

Use a default playback window or a playback window created by the application; specify the size and location of the playback area within the window; minimize, maximize, move, hide, or show the window; and change the window caption

Control the usage of the system colors and turn sound playback off or on

Get status information, including playback state, current frame number, window handle, and palette handle

Summary: Playback Using Movie Player Functions

Using the Movie Player functions is more work because your application is responsible for starting the Movie Player, loading the movie, creating the stage window, starting the movie, and advancing the frames. It must keep track of the movie ID of each Movie Player instance and tell the Movie Player to update the stage window when the window is invalidated. The Movie Player API provides the following capabilities beyond the basic MCI playback functions:

The ability to load an RMMP chunk from an open data file

Control over the loading of cast members and the use of the image buffer

Control over frame advancement

The ability to specify a device context for the display of movie frames

The ability to specify tempo settings for the movie

The ability to set the movie to automatically repeat

The ability to specify a callback function that is executed after frame updates and before script-channel processing

The ability to retrieve detailed information on movie files on disk and in memory, and get detailed error information

Chapter 7, “Using the Movie Player Functions,” describes how to use the Movie Player functions. The rest of this chapter discusses the MCI Movie Driver.