Components in Flash MX 2004 and Flash 8

Flash MX 2004 introduced a brand new component architecture called the v2 (or “version 2”) Component architecture. Components based on this new code base were released at this time, and developers had to adopt a new way of working with components. Flash 8 still uses the v2 Component architecture, so the event model, components, and ActionScript are largely the same. However, numerous bugs have been fixed to improve your experience working with v2 components.

In Flash Professional 8 there is a new video component called FLVPlayback. This component also has skinnable assets called the FLV Playback Custom UI components, which you might use when you need to customize video playback of FLV files in an application. Flash MX Professional 2004 had several media components, which were not easy to customize or skin.

The FLVPlayback component is easily to customize and skin in a variety of ways. You can create a SWF file that contains specifically named assets to skin the FLVPlayback component. Or you can use the aforementioned FLV Playback Custom UI components. Alternatively, you might use the VideoPlayer class (the class that the FLVPlayback component is based on) to build your own player.

For more information, refer to the Components Language Reference in Flash Help (F1). For a tutorial on creating a SWF file to skin the FLVPlayback component, see Customizing the FLVPlayback Component by Dan Carr.