Trouble playing video in Desktop Application

Question

Hi,
I'm trying to play two H.264 encoded videos (.mov) within an AS3 desktop application. I have tried publishing both Air and Projector but both are having (different) problems with playback. When testing the swfs within Flash they both work fine.
I'm using a simple NetStream function to play the videos from a local directory. Like I said they both run fine within Flash, so I feel like I'm missing something obvious, but have found it difficult to find documentation on streaming locally.
The Air app works best, but can't seem to play the second video. (I also have been having awful trouble getting around security issues of Air as I'm using LocalConnection in another part of the app, so would prefer not to use it).
The projector starts playing both videos but very quickly starts to stutter and choke, and eventually freezes the entire app.
The Adobe documentation says that it is possible to use NetStream locally, but maybe this isn't the case?
Anyone have any ideas?!
Thanks,
Maryann

Answer 1

I think you started the right way - there'd be no reason to suspect this problem would exist initially. I don't have a direct solution for you, but I find that it's helpful to create small-scale samples of what the problem is, and suggest trying the following...
Create a simple SWF file that only loads & plays the video. Don't do anything else in this file (in the unlikely event that something else is affected video playback), and then view these in the projector and AIR manner.
Also, just try using the included video component in another simple example, and view in projector/AIR, just to see if you encounter the same playback issues. If you do, I'd initially suspec something about your computer system versus Flash.
I haven't run across, or seen issues like this, with regards to loading/controlling video using the NetConnection and Netsrream classes... I've done a few projects with H.264 videos, but they were in the MP4 format, not MOV (I'd guess there should be no playback difference, though).
One last thought - what is the data rate you compressed your videos to? If it's a really high one (2 megabits per second), maybe it's too taxing on your system (and is too high for general broadband viewing, anyways).