Flash rendering order off screen

Question

Hi,
I have a series of simple flash movies (each is a separate swf) on a website that render and then upload to a PHP script.
When the movies are not on the visible screen (i.e. the window is minimized, screensaver is on or the movie is simply below the visible screen area) the rendering and upload speed of the movie greatly reduces (up to 20x slower).
Does flash player automatically give processor/memory precedence to movies that are visible?
If it does, is there any way to tell it to not do this and render all movies on the page regardless of how visible they are?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Flash version: 10, 1, 53, 64
Debug: No
OS: Windows XP 32bit
Browser: Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.11
Murray
Message was edited by: murraypicton (Missed off system info)

Answer 1

We've had similar difficulties and discovered that the window settings for Flash CS3 are read from an XML file named "workspacelayout.xml" found in the following path on a Windows XP workstation:
C:\Documents and Settings\WINDOWS_USER_NAME\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\Flash CS3\LANGUAGE_CODE\Configuration
(Note that WINDOWS_USER_NAME should be replaced with the user name having the trouble, and LANGUAGE_CODE be replaced with an appropriate language code. "en" is the language code for US English.)
In that file, there is a tag similar to:
  <application maximize="false" rect="0 0 1083 839"/>
Simply set attribute "rect" to something representing an easy to find rectangle (preferably on monitor 1 if multiple monitors are enabled).
For example:
  <application maximize="false" rect="0 0 100 100"/>
... will cause the flash application window open with upper-left corner at (0,0) and lower-right corner at (100,100) on monitor 1. Note that Flash should not be running when making this change.
When Flash closes, it also writes it's last window coordinates to the registry under:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ADOBE\Flash 9\Settings]
"Window"="0 0 100 100"
However, our tests indicate that it does not use the registry values on startup (if the workspacelayout.xml file is found).
We did discover that deleting the entire HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ADOBE\Flash 9\ registry key did indeed reset the window layout, among many other settings.