Category: Flash

To save bandwidth, most of servers will practice some hotlink protection, usually using either following script to check whether the HTTP referer is come from the same server, most script are focus on image file, but it can slightly modified for FLV protection. There are two common methods to do that:

Edit in .htaccess RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(flv|mp3)$ - [NC,F,L]

Edit in httpd.conf, first enabled this:
LoadModule setenvif_module modules/mod_setenvif.so
then put it inside <VirtualHost>, just before </VirtualHost>
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain.com(/|$)" local_ref=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^$" local_ref=1
<FilesMatch "\.(flv|mp3)">
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from env=local_ref
</FilesMatch>

However, FLV need to play through Flash Player, different browsers and even minor versions handle plugin HTTP referer differently, so it make such hotlink protection through HTTP referer means impossible 🙁

The hotlink protection cause problem when you let other people embed your video player in their site (like Youtube do), from the above table, you can find the third column will not work, for example in safari (MAC), the video cannot play because Apache think the FLV is linked by third party website and forbid FLV to be accessed.

If you use POST method to send parameters, the received result is XML, you should use LoadVars or XML? sendAndLoad from LoadVars cannot handle received XML format, sendAndLoad from XML can use GET method to send parameters only, cannot use POST Method. I have already sticked to write AS3, suddenly switch back to AS1, I forgot how to code, googling (cannot find any useful tutorial). Finally, I find out by myself: LoadVars’ sendAndLoad can assign receive Object, usually assign itself, so never consider it can be others before, that is XML Object, ha!

login_lv = new LoadVars();
login_xml = new XML();
login_xml.ignoreWhite = true;
login_xml.onLoad = function(suc) {
// parse XML result here
};
login_lv.loginname = loginName_tf.text;
login_lv.password = pwd_tf.text;
login_lv.sendAndLoad("login.php", login_xml, "POST");

Designers always face this problem, inside a MovieClip, there are different symbols, when MovieClip is semi-transparent, each symbol has its own semi-transparent, so the colors are mixed together as the following example:

To solve this problem you can set MovieClip BlendMode to Layer

ActionScript syntax: mc.blendMode = "layer";(For Flash 8 AS1/2, too)

Download sample fla(Flash CS3)

When loading XML File and parsing, usually use ChildNode[n].toString() for extract the data, sound like it can get the data and convert to “String” or other variable type. Normally, it has no problem, but when the XML contains special characte, it will get back wrong data, for example special characters like: ‘, &, ". Here is an example, let say being loaded XML File is:<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<data>
　　<sentence><![CDATA[Luar's "Friends" & Friends]]>ActionScript:var xml:XML = new XML();
xml.ignoreWhite = true;
xml.onLoad = function() {
　　var node:XMLNode = this.firstChild.childNodes[0];
　　trace(node.childNodes[0]);
　　trace(node.childNodes[0].toString());
　　trace(node.childNodes[0].nodeValue);
};
xml.load("sample.xml");trace result:Luar&apos;s &quot;Friends&quot; &amp; Friends
Luar&apos;s &quot;Friends&quot; &amp; Friends
Luar's "Friends" & Friends