Need help with FLV type SWF playback in flash movie

Question

Hi,
I have three external SWF files from a client without FLA
sources. The SWFs were done 3 years ago by someone else so there is
no way to modify the existing SWF files. These contain no
interactivity but may involve nested clips on the main timeline.
They are AS1 or AS2 files so they need to be done with AS2
scripting to keep it simple.
I need to call these SWF files inside another flash movie and
play them in a player window as if they were video files with
play/pause, seekbar and volume controls. The needed functionality
is similar to FLV players. My controls will use custom graphic
buttons and sliders mimicking the look of CNN video player window.
Does anyone know a good tutorial on how to script these
controls for SWF?
Most likely I think I will load it in a clip and I am
thinking that I will need to get the duration of the loaded swf in
order to set up the seekbar.
Thanks in advance,
Attila

Answer 1

I think your professor, or somebody, gave you directions with ActionScript 2 programming. In AS2, what oyu have here would have worked just fine. But, in AS3, you need to use a fairly different approach. Your buttons, and their instance name, can remain the same. But now, in AS3, you have to add event listeners in the following manner:
yourButtonName.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, yourListenerFunction);
In your case, you can do one of two things - A) assign a unique listener function to each button, or B) assign the same listsner to both functions:
A)
start_btn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, startPolygon);
stop_btn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, stopPolygon);
function startPolygon(e:MouseEvent):void{
    polygon.play();
function stopPolygon(e:MouseEvent):void{
    polygon.stop();
B)
start_btn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, controlPolygon);
stop_btn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, controlPolygon);
function controlPolygon(e:MouseEvent):void{
   if (e.target.name == "start_btn") {//Test for the name of the object that dispatched the CLICK event
      polygon.play();
   } else if (e.target.name == "stop_btn") {
      polygon.stop();
When I'm using several buttons that do the same/nearly similar things, I favor approach B over A, as it keeps me to jsut one single function to deal with.