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Encoder QR-Code in Font See...we told you.

Adobe has this amazing habit of enhancing the functionality of a feature in a new release of an application with little or no fan fare. Flash CS5 is no exception. Prior to this release adding ActionScript, cue points that allowed the user to navigate to specific points in a video created a cumbersome workflow. It involved either adding the cue points in the Adobe Media Encoder or adding them in the cue points area of the Component Inspector. The issue here was the cue points were hardwired into the FLV. If the timing was off or there was a typo, you essentially started the process all over again. This has all changed. Let s see how:

added the FLVPlayback component to the stage along with five buttons that will be used to navigate through the video. The video is the story of a young man who decides to skip college and become a cartoon character. The neat thing about the video is it is broken into five sections. Feel free to click the Play button on the component to review the video. We think you will find it to be rather hilarious.

2. Scrub back to the start of the video, and with the component selected on the stage, twirl down the

Name, Time, and Type areas contain values. Click the cue point s name, and change it from Cue Point 1 to Decision. The other really slick feature here is the Time parameter is hot text, meaning you can scrub across it to change the timing for the cue point if you think the time needs to change. Also, take a look at the cuePoints area of the component. Notice how the cue point now appears there

Figure 10-27. Adding an ActionScript cue point just got a ton easier. Before we move forward with this exercise, let s get really clear about these things. Cue points can be added to a video s metadata and can be read by any application that understands metadata. The neat thing about metadata and cue points is they stay with the video file. The bad news is ActionScript cue points work only with Flash Player. The good news is they can be added or removed without affecting the video. Cue points can be embedded into the FLV or can be contained in external files, usually XML documents. We are not huge fans of embedding because XML offers a degree of flexibility you simply can t obtain with cue points embedded in an FLV. For example, many video sites will pop up little advertising messages while the video plays. Putting these things into an XML document means they can be changed regularly without having to open the FLA. There are also two types of cue points: navigation and event. Navigation cue points let you skip to sections of a video, whereas event cue points will trigger something in Flash Player when the cue point is reached. A good example of this are those little ads we talked about in the previous paragraph.

out appear. If the video won t scrub to that point, click the Play button on the component, and when the words appear, pause the video. Add a cue point named StartingOut at this point by simply clicking the + sign to add it.

Figure 10-28. Get to the point in the video where you need a cue point and simply add it. Next up is wiring up the buttons on the stage with the ActionScript that pops you through the video. If you click the component, you will see we have given it the instance name of myVideo in the Properties panel. As well, each button has been given an instance name. Let s get wiring: