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Basics of video

One important capability of Adobe® Flash® Player and Adobe® AIR™ is the ability to display and manipulate video information with ActionScript in the same way that you can manipulate other visual content such as images, animation, text, and so on. When you create a Flash Video (FLV) file in Adobe Flash CS4 Professional, you have the option to select a skin that includes common playback controls. However, there is no reason you need to limit yourself to the options available. Using ActionScript, you have fine-tuned control over loading, displaying, and playback of video—meaning you could create your own video player skin, or use your video in any less traditional way that you want. Working with video in ActionScript involves working with a combination of several classes:

  • Video class: The classic video content box on the Stage is an instance of the Video class. The Video class is a display object, so it can be manipulated using the same techniques that can be applied to other display objects, such as positioning, applying transformations, applying filters and blending modes, and so forth.

  • StageVideo class: The Video class typically uses software decoding and rendering. When GPU hardware acceleration is available on a device, your application can take best advantage of hardware accelerated presentation by switching to the StageVideo class. The StageVideo API includes a set of events that tell your code when to switch between StageVideo and Video objects. Stage video imposes some minor restrictions on video playback. If your application accepts those limitations, implement the StageVideo API. See Guidelines and limitations.

  • NetStream class: When you're loading a video file to be controlled by ActionScript, a NetStream instance represents the source of the video content—in this case, a stream of video data. Using a NetStream instance also involves using a NetConnection object, which is the connection to the video file—like the tunnel that the video data is fed through.

  • Camera class: When you're working with video data from a camera connected to the user's computer, a Camera instance represents the source of the video content—the user's camera and the video data it makes available. New in Flash Player 11.4 and AIR 3.4, you can use a camera to feed StageVideo.

When you're loading external video, you can load the file from a standard web server for progressive download, or you can work with streaming video delivered by a specialized server such as Adobe's Flash® Media Server.

Important concepts and terms​

Cue point
A marker that can be placed at a specific moment in time in a video file, for example to act like a bookmark for locating that point in time, or to provide additional data that is associated with that moment in time.

Encoding
The process of taking video data in one format and converting it to another video data format; for example, taking a high-resolution source video and converting it to a format that's suitable for Internet delivery.

Frame
A single segment of video information; each frame is like a still image representing a snapshot of a moment in time. By playing frames in sequence at high speed, the illusion of motion is created.

Keyframe
A video frame which contains the full information for the frame. Other frames that follow a keyframe only contain information about how they differ from the keyframe, rather than containing the full frame's worth of information.

Metadata
Information about a video file that is embedded within the video file and retrieved when the video has loaded.

Progressive download
When a video file is delivered from a standard web server, the video data is loaded using progressive download, meaning the video information loads in sequence. This has the benefit that the video can begin playing before the entire file is downloaded; however, it prevents you from jumping ahead to a part of the video that hasn't loaded.

Streaming
As an alternative to progressive download, a special video server can be used to deliver video over the Internet using a technique known as streaming (sometimes called "true streaming"). With streaming, the viewer's computer never downloads the entire video at one time. To speed up download times, at any moment the computer only needs a portion of the total video information. Because a special server controls the delivery of the video content, any part of the video can be accessed at any time, rather than needing to wait for it to download before accessing it.