A couple of people have emailed me questions about playing SWF files using the this.player plugin I released last week. There are some limitations to this, which I forgot to mention in my initial post. I’ll try to clarify things a bit more.

Timeline animation only

The player movie that’s used to display your content controls the main timeline. If your Flash movie has lot of scripting, chances are you’re not using the root timeline at all, or scripts could be interfering with or controlling the movie’s playback. This will cause erratic behaviour in the player. It’s really only meant to play back very basic movies animated on the main timeline. You should embed more complex movies using something like Geoff Stearns’s SWFObject.

Display size

Currently, the loaded movie is played at 100%. It’s not scaled down to fit the player’s display size, so if the player is smaller than the content is only the top left portion will be shown. This is for a number of reasons, but mainly because I can’t read the stage size from the loaded movie. Using the width and height properties instead will cause unwanted behavior when things are placed outside the stage to be animated in later. This is a common practice among Flash animators.

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