Flv counter

Question

Hi there,
The basics of it are - I'm trying to come up with a way to
start/stop a timer when a cue point is hit. like a start stop on a
stopwatch. Its for a piece of race footage where the lap starts
some time through the flv.
Now more in depth - I want the timer to be a dynamic text box
that when you scrub back and forth on the flv playhead
the timer responds acordingly as if it were the flv timecode.
Now there are 2 ways I can see this going. First to write a large
lump of code and design a custom timer, or offset the flvs time in
actionscript so that when it hits the first cue point it has
reached 0 and the cue point would tell the alpha of the dynamic
text box to change from 0% to 100% (so it looks like it has started
on the cue point)..
Which is easier and how would I go about writting the action
script for it.
I know this is a big project, but im hoping that there is a
way to offset as I think this might be a quicker option.
Thanks in advance for anyone who would know how to tackle
this.

Answer 1

Are you using the FLVPlayback component? If so, I'd probably
use the offset approach you mentioned.
If you use the cuepoint to trigger the start of your timer,
consider that it will never happen if someone scrubs into the
'timer' range from outside.....so you may need to set it up as a
listener for the whole video in the playheadUpdate event.
If you use the cuepoint approach, once the cuepoint triggers,
you know the playheadTime from the cuepoint event data already (or
you can check it as playheadTime) and set this as your 'zero' time
and fade in your textfield or whatever. You may want the listener
even set up without the cuepoint... if they scrub over the cue
point and arrive in the "timer" range somewhere, the cuepoint never
fired and so the timer doesn't show. Or you could do it the same
way using the playheadUpdate and a check for proximity to the
'zero' time (which you have hard coded) to start the fade in.
Whether its set up by the cuepoint, or you set it up for the
whole video, you just need to set up a listener for playheadUpdate
event (change the playheadUpdateInterval if you want it to be more
frequent than 0.1 secs - its probably OK as is for what you want).
In the listener, first check that the playheadTime is within
the range that you want it to be visible. If its not then I'd make
the text field instantly not visible (you could fade it out if it
was close to the time when it would normally fade while "playing"
,but if its scrubbed out of the 'timer' range then probably you
want it to be instantly gone rather than fade...? ) .
If its in range, then you could check and see if the
textfields _visible property is false (which may be the case if it
was scrubbed into the middle of the timer range from outside ) and
if so make it true. And then assign it the value of the current
playheadTime minus the 'zero' playheadTime like you described.