Before deciding how to distribute a movie, it helps to understand how Director plays movies. Director movies play either with the Shockwave Player or through a projector player. The Shockwave Player is a system component that plays movies in web browsers and also outside browsers as stand-alone applications. A projector player can only play movies independently of a web browser.
You can distribute movies as Shockwave content (with the DCR extension), projectors, Shockwave projectors, or protected movies (DXR extension). You should not distribute source movies (DIR extension) unless you want your users to be able to change the movie in the Director authoring environment.
Shockwave content is a compressed version of a movie's data and does not include a player. Shockwave content is created primarily to distribute over the Internet for playback in a web browser. Another reason to create Shockwave content is to compress it for distribution on a disk when the movie is contained in a projector. In addition to compressing the data, saving a movie in the Shockwave format removes all information necessary to edit the movie.
A projector is a movie intended for play outside of a web browser. A projector can include a player (called the Standard player), Xtra extensions, multiple casts, and linked media in a single file. A projector can also include several different movie files. Configured in this way, a projector can be a completely stand-alone application.
A Shockwave projector makes a much smaller projector. A Shockwave projector uses an installed Shockwave Player on the user's system to play a movie instead of including the player code in the projector itself. If no Shockwave Player is installed on the user's system, the user must download a copy. A Shockwave projector is excellent for distributing movies on the Internet that you don't intend to play in a web browser.
You can also reduce the file size of a projector by turning on projector options that compress the movie data, the player code, or both. In Windows, compressing the player code reduces the minimum projector size from approximately 2.1 MB to 1.1 MB for a projector, and to about 60K for a Shockwave projector.
On the Macintosh, compressing the player code reduces the minimum projector size from approximately 2.5 MB to 1.2 MB for a projector, and to approximately 12K for a Shockwave projector.
Protected movies (.DXR extension) are uncompressed movies that users can't open for editing. These can be useful when you want to distribute uncompressed movies on a disk, but you don't want users to edit the source file. Protected movies may play faster than Shockwave content from a disk because they do not need to be decompressed. These movies are preferable if disk space isn't limited. Like Shockwave content, protected movies do not include the information necessary to edit the movie or the software that plays the movie. They can be played only by a projector, a movie in a window, or the Shockwave Player.
Note: To edit a movie packaged for distribution, you must edit the source file (DIR) and create a new movie in one of the distribution formats. Always save your source files.
Comments
Thomas Higgins
said on
Mar 25, 2005
at
10:18 AM :
Please note that the third bullet point above refers to the ability to compress the player code which is a feature no longer available in Director MX 2004. In Macromedia Director versions 7 through MX there was an ability to create "Compressed" projectors which contained compressed versions of the needed player engine libraries to reduce the overall projector size at the expense of launch time. As of Director MX 2004 this feature was removed and so the documentation above is incorrect in that you cannot compress the player code. There are options for media compression that continue to be available though, thought I'd make that clear for folks.
robertwho
said on
Apr 13, 2005
at
8:36 PM :
Don't know who can help? I'm maintaining an old "movie", actually I'm streaminglining the Lingo codes by taking away/or changing some common codes to function calls to reduce the size. To my dismay, with my gradually reducing the Lingo codes, the dir file's size gradually grow from 280M to 430M and resulting dcr file gradually grow from 4.8M to 11M! I understand partially that dir file size might grow due to somehow director keep the history info, how come dcr file size also grow at such mad speed? SOS!
Thomas Higgins
said on
Apr 14, 2005
at
10:10 AM :
This seems more of a general usage question so for further follow-up on this please consult any one of the numerous newsgroup forums (hosted by macromedia) or mailing lists (3rd party hosted) to get more information. In general you can use the Save and Compact feature to reduce this increasing file size overhead. Saving and Compacting will cause Director to do a more thorough job of saving the file while removing now unneeded bits, but this can take a bit longer to complete than a normal save, especially with files as large as you are using. Therefore during your normal course of developing using the standard save is the way to go, then periodically use Save and Compact to do a reality check on your file size.
ROLL
said on
Jun 1, 2005
at
8:43 AM :
Can mobile users download the Shockwave Player?
Thomas Higgins
said on
Jun 1, 2005
at
5:10 PM :
The Shockwave Player is not available for "mobile" users (I'm assuming that you are referring to cell phone/PDA/etc. devices when you say "mobile"). As of today we support Windows and Macintosh operating systems as per the following system requirements page:
Comments
Thomas Higgins said on Mar 25, 2005 at 10:18 AM : robertwho said on Apr 13, 2005 at 8:36 PM : Thomas Higgins said on Apr 14, 2005 at 10:10 AM : ROLL said on Jun 1, 2005 at 8:43 AM : Thomas Higgins said on Jun 1, 2005 at 5:10 PM :