Flash Player Article

Exploring full-screen mode in Flash Player 9

The rise in broadband penetration has enabled tremendous growth in the use of video on the web. According to a March 2007 comScore Video Metrix rankings study, five out of every seven Internet users (71.4 percent) in the US streamed video online. In addition, a June 2007 Pew Internet & American Life Project report states that 47% of adults in the US have high-speed connections at home.

Contributing to this trend, Flash video is being used to deliver new types of integrated, interactive video content and applications, as well as enabling new business models for video on the web. Since the release of Macromedia Studio 8 and Macromedia Flash Player 8, the use of Flash video has exploded on the Internet for all kinds of content—from video sharing sites that highlight home videos of teens dressed as ninjas singing karaoke to movie trailers, ads, and full episodes of TV shows.

While Flash Player and Flash video currently provide a great video experience that "just works," it hasn't quite delivered on the full immersive experience many people posting video to the web would like to provide for their viewers. To enable a richer experience, one that takes the viewer out of the frame of the browser and fills the entire computer screen, you can now take advantage of the full-screen mode in Adobe Flash Player 9.

Although you can use full-screen mode for any type of Flash application, Flash video applications were the primary use case that the Flash Player team focused on in this initial implementation. For this reason, there are a number of security restrictions to full-screen mode (detailed in the next section), which may limit its usefulness with some fully interactive Flash applications or games. We hope to address these limitations in future versions of Flash Player as we continue to develop this feature.

How full-screen mode works

Full-screen mode was already supported in previous versions of the Flash stand-alone player and projectors, and we have not changed that implementation. However, we have added new ActionScript that will work in both the stand-alone player and the browser players, and a new HTML tag parameter allowFullScreen to enable the mode. The full-screen mode in Flash Player is initiated through ActionScript and can be terminated through ActionScript, keyboard shortcuts, or by the user switching focus to another window.

If you have the latest version of Flash Player installed, you can now also choose what part of your stage fills the screen. By assigning a value to fullScreenRect before going into full-screen mode, you can trigger a hardware-scaled view of your video that plays back your video with even better performance.

Because hardware scaling involves using capabilities of the user's video card, Flash Player will fall back to the original software-rendered full screen if the video card does not support this feature. Also, the user can choose to disable hardware scaling which will also cause the original software-rendered full-screen mode to be displayed.

Full-screen mode was not originally supported if the wmode is opaque or transparent windowless, but it is now supported starting with the latest version of Flash Player. If the user has multiple monitors, Flash Player uses a metric to determine the monitor that contains the greatest portion of the Flash movie and then goes full-screen in that main monitor.

You must have version 9,0,28,0 or later of Flash Player installed to use full-screen mode and 9,0,115,0 or later for hardware-scaled full-screen mode.

Note: The keyboard shortcuts which terminate full-screen mode are Escape (Windows and Mac OS), Control+W (Windows), Command+W (Mac OS), and Alt+F4 (Windows).

Security

End-user security was a key consideration in the implementation of this feature, and developers need to understand the following end-user, security-related restrictions and design content accordingly:

• To enable full-screen mode, developers must add a new <object> and <embed> tag parameter, allowFullScreen, to their HTML. This parameter defaults to false, or not allowing full screen. To allow full-screen, developers must set allowFullScreen to true in their <object>/<embed> tags.
• An overlay dialog box will appear when the movie enters full-screen mode, instructing the user how to exit and return to normal mode. The dialog box appears for a few seconds and then fades out.
• The ActionScript that initiates full-screen mode can be called only in response to a mouse click or keypress. If it is called in other situations, it will be ignored (in ActionScript 2.0) or throw an exception (in ActionScript 3.0).
• Users cannot enter text in text input fields while in full-screen mode. All keyboard input and key-related ActionScript is disabled while in full-screen mode, with the exception of the keyboard shortcuts that take the viewer out of full-screen mode.
• The user can disable full-screen mode for all Flash movies by adding a setting to the Flash Player configuration file mms.cfg. The file is described in the TechNote, IT Administration: Configuring Flash Player Auto-Update Notification. Add the line: FullScreenDisable=1 to the mms.cfg file to disable full-screen mode.

These restrictions apply to the Flash plug-in and ActiveX control but not to the Flash stand-alone player or Flash projectors.

Requirements

To complete this tutorial you will need to install the following software and files:

Flash CS3 Professional

• Try
• Buy

Note: For users of Flash CS3 Professional, an update including all debug and release versions of Flash Player 9 Update 3—and a new video playback component supporting H.264—is now available via Adobe Update Manager or directly from the Flash Support Center.

Flash Player 9

• Download

Sample HTML templates for Flex Builder:

• fullscreen_article_assets.zip (ZIP, 16K)

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