Wired Movies and Sprites

The Flash Media Handler

QuickTime 4 has added support for the interactive playback of SWF 3.0 files by introducing a new Flash media handler. (Note that future versions of QuickTime will support later versions of SWF files.) This media handler allows a SWF file to be treated as a track within a QuickTime movie. Because a QuickTime movie may contain any number of tracks, multiple SWF tracks may be added to the same movie. The Flash Media Handler also provides support for an optimized case using the alpha channel graphics mode, which allows a Flash track to be composited cleanly over other tracks.

QuickTime supports all Flash actions except for the Flash load movie action. For example, when a Flash track in a QuickTime movie contains an action that goes to a particular Flash frame, QuickTime converts this to a wired action that goes to the QuickTime movie time in the corresponding Flash frame.

As a time-based media playback format, QuickTime may drop frames when necessary to maintain its schedule. As a consequence, frames of a SWF file may be dropped during playback. If this is not satisfactory for your application, you may set the playback mode of the movie to Play All Frames, which will emulate the playback mode of ShockWave. QuickTime's SWF file importer sets the Play All Frames mode automatically when adding a SWF file to an empty movie.