What makes a Flash Player movies stream different from a big GIF or JPEG files stream?
All data moving to a user’s machine over a network connection is streamed. What makes a Flash movie stream differently is that the data in a Flash movie file is stored sequentially by frame. As soon as the Flash Player receives all of the data for a single frame of a Flash movie, the Player immediately renders that frame to the screen without waiting for any more movie data to arrive. To understand streaming, it helps to understand how Flash stores data. Image data and sound data are stored somewhat differently. Image data Image data in Flash consists of a set of coordinate values for each curve and fill that comprises the image. • Flash stores the image data for any graphic that is not converted to a symbol, a bitmap, or text in each and every frame in which the graphic appears. • The image data for a graphic that is converted to a symbol is stored in the first key frame in which the symbol appears. Subsequent frames using that symbol don’t store the image data for that symbol. Rather
