Allow CD Spinning

[chrisl]

I use a lot of large movies when making the multimedia CDs for my company. It's a media company and we like to showcase our work this way.

Our movies and music are loaded using the loadmovie command, but the disk needs to be spun up first before this is done. After one link is clicked, the movie plays, and being as long as it is, the CD spins down again, only to spin up again when the next movie is click to view in flash.

I believe this process could be much faster if SWF Studio would have a command to keep the CD spinning for a certain amount of time or indefinitely.

[northcode]

Interesting. You might be able to do it yourself with a movieclip that periodically used the FileSys plugin to get a dir list of the CD drive (or accessed a file). I'll see if I can find a way to do this automatically though (as an option you can configure).

[chrisl]

Thanks so much. I did in fact try the movie clip and though it kept referring back to a file on the CD, the file was kept in ram and the CD spun down anyway. In essence, the clip reference would have to keep referring to a different file each time in order for the CD to keep spinning, and since we don't know how long the user session will last, it becomes impossible to make an adaquate number of dummy files to fill the time.; appx. a 10 second interval between spin up and spin down.

[chrisl]

By the way, when do you think you'll have this option available? Looking forward to it!

[northcode]

I tried a couple of quick tests that just accessed the drive but, as you discovered, the CD caches the directory information so that doesn't work.

I did find a utility called spindown (http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~aa571) which claims to be able to change the CD spindown time but I haven't tested it yet. From a quick read of the spindown docs I gather that there may be some drawbacks to using it. One of the biggie is that making the CD drive spin longer can reduce its MTBF (life expectancy). You probably don't want to kill your user's hard drive.

I was thinking we might try a simpler approach where we "preload" a file before it's needed, without using Flash. The idea would be to read the file into a memory buffer before and then just toss the buffer. That should cause the CD to spin up and load the file into the CD read ahead buffer. At the very least the drive will be spinning when you need it to be spinning.

[chrisl]

Great, well, I assume this preload then would be an option in Studio since you suggest it's a non-Flash option. Looking forward to see how you pull it off, I think it would be a pretty helpful thing. If you could let me know how quickly this can be done, I'd really appreciate it, as I've got a deadline to get this multimedia project through.

[evoDev]

I'm interested in doing the same thing. I've got 10,000 -- 1k text fields in sequential numeric order but it doesn't seem to keep the drive spinning at top speed, causing the usual spinup issue when the next video file is loaded.

I'm also having a problem with 'streaming from disc'... I haven't done extensive tests with SWF studio yet, but the flash projector would freeze when loading a large swf from the disk. I suppose it was expecting the file to be local, therefore it waited for the whole thing to load before continuing. A big pain. Is there a way to use SWF studio to ease the loading of these large files?

[chrisl]

I've been waiting for one year for someone to do something about it. Have received no new news about this. How about it Northcode? Keep the CD spinning option in the next release?

[ariel_gronau]

Well, I am glad that some people have the same exact problems as I have but there is still no solution.

this is a big problem for me as well. I have a big multimedia project with many files loading and unloading. I can still not control the cd, and while a file is loading - the whole application just freezes.

did someone find anything about how to solve this??

please help.... :)

thansk,
ariel.