Using Director > Playing Movies over the Internet > Testing your movie

 

Testing your movie

However you choose to create your movie, test it thoroughly before releasing it to the public. Make sure you test on systems with all common types of Internet connections, especially on slow modems and at busy times of day. Here is a list of things you might want to check before distributing your movie over the Internet; remember, however, that each movie has its own special needs:

Compare a streaming version of the movie to a nonstreaming version to see if the performance is different. Some smaller movies may work better without streaming playback.

Verify that all linked media elements appear correctly. To see if the movie correctly handles an error, try forcing the linked media elements to fail.

Run the movie on all systems your users are likely to have. For the general public, this includes Windows 95, 98, and NT and Mac OS 8.x and 9.

Run the movie on very slow modem connections and on fast T3 connections; problems can arise from fast as well as slow connections.

Check for display problems on systems set to 8-, 16-, 24-, and 32-bit color. Also test as many types of monitors and display adapters as you can.

Check for font mapping problems in your movie. If your movie uses nonstandard fonts, use embedded fonts. See Embedding fonts in movies.

Check for sound problems, particularly if you stream sounds with Shockwave Audio.