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Chapter 24: Packaging Movies for
Distribution
When you finish authoring your Adobe
®
Director
®
movie, you have a choice of several ways to prepare it for distri-
bution. You can distribute a movie in the Shockwave
®
Player format that plays in a browser, or you can distribute it
as a stand-alone projector. Stand-alone projectors can contain the software necessary to play the movie, or they can
use an installed Shockwave Player to play the movie independent of a browser. You can also export a movie as a
digital video.
Director provides several features to prepare movies for distribution. These features include determining Publish
settings and deciding which Xtra extensions to include, exclude, or download. You can also preview your movie in a
browser and batch-process movie files to compress them and protect them from being edited.
Note:
Ensure that your files have write permissions before publishing. Publishing fails for read-only files.
Unicode names for the following are not supported when the movie is run using the HTTP protocol:
•
Linked files
•
HTML and DCR files
•
External casts
•
CCT and CXT files
About distributing movies
When you finish creating a movie, you have the following choices about how to distribute it to users:
•
Shockwave content is a compressed version of only the movie data.
•
A projector is a stand-alone version of a movie. You can include one movie in a projector that links to other
external movies or include several movies in a single projector. The system handles projectors as executable appli-
cation files.
Movies that are distributed from the Internet can begin playing as soon as the content for the first frame is
downloaded. This process is called streaming. For more information on streaming, see
Setting movie playback
options
.
•
To create Shockwave content that can play in a web page, use the File > Publish command. Director leaves your
original movie in its DIR format. Director also creates Shockwave content in the DCR format.
If you use the default Publish settings, Director creates an HTML page that is completely configured with
EMBED
tags
and everything else you need to run your movie in a browser. By default, Director saves all these new files in the same
folder as your original Director movie. For more information about putting your Director movie on the web, see
Creating Shockwave content
.
For more information about how to distribute Xtra extensions with projectors, see TechNote 13965 in the Director
Support Center at
www.adobe.com/go/director_support
. Although the note might refer to Director 7, the infor-
mation is the same for more recent versions of Director.
