The Math Is Easy

A Note on VideoDisplay in Flex

// March 6th, 2009 // Actionscript 3, AIR, Flash, Flex, Programming

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I just wasted an hour trying to track down the cause of a VideoDisplay-related bug, and I’m posting the very simple solution here to hopefully save one or two people (including future Daniel) some headaches.

I’m throwing together a very quick performance demo in which I’m throwing many videos on a very, very large display, programmatically, and delivering as an AIR app. The problem that I’m experiencing is this:

"Error: 1000: Unable to make connection to server or to find FLV on server."

No matter what I did, no matter what file type I used (H.264 or anything older), this was happening. The problem, quite simply, is the order of commands.

1
currentVideo.source = videoSource;
2
currentVideo.play();
3
videoContainer.addChild( currentVideo );

That breaks Flash. This does not:

1
videoContainer.addChild( currentVideo );
2
currentVideo.source = videoSource;
3
currentVideo.play();

So there you have it. When you’re dealing with VideoDisplay programmatically, make sure the VideoDisplay instance is part of your displaylist before giving it a source and playing it!