Re: ming slideshow

Hi,

Your page works fine for me at 56k, the resulting flash file is only 27k and shouldnt cause anyone a problem.  The main problem I see is that you are generating the flash for every page view and that could be overloading your server resources.  It would be much better to make the genflash.php be an admin function that you do when the content changes, outputs to current.swf, and then load the swf from your page.  When I increase the number of pics to 50 then then I get 176k swf so you might want to put a loader in. I would expect you are getting a php execution timeout at that point which you can fix with  set_time_limit(0);

Hope it helps
Dave...

--- "Antony Briggs" <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Guys,

I posted a little while ago with a problem on creating an image slideshow on
a windows box. I have since moved to Linux and things seemed to be going
fine, except now I'm having similar problems again :-(

A little background:

(for a demo of the current version, have a look at:
http://www.hamstercottages.co.uk)

The php-ming script is sourcing a load of jpegs, and cross fading between
them. My initial version created 3 SWFSprite()'s and each one was positioned
differently on the screen and cross faded between one-third of the available
images. (please see demo to understand what I'm banging on about).

This seemed to be working beautifully and I thought the job was put to bed.
But the client rang the next day saying the movie loaded really slowly on
his 128k isdn connection and can I speed it up?

So I loaded the resulting swf file into flash and saw that it was loading
all the jpegs in the first frame (which contained the 3 SWFSprite()'s )
instead of streaming them in. "Pah!" I said. so re-wrote the script so all
the jpegs are in the main timeline and for each frame the php manages what
stage of the fade each jpeg is in.

While developing the code, I had it restricted to 14 images and it works
very well. I downloaded the resulting swf and viewed it in flash as before,
and it now streams the jpegs in, with a maximum peak of about 2k/sec.
"Fantastic!" I said and removed the restriction. And now I'm back to where I
started. The script is producing some output, but flash flayer won't load
it.

Anyone any ideas?

My Linux ISP is running ming 0.2a compiled into php with
'--with-ming=shared'. If I upload a recent mod_ming.so and add it to
php.ini, will it override the compiled in version? Will a newer version make
any difference?

I've attached the script to this message in case anyone would like to play
with it. It downloads the necessary images to /tmp and re-sizes them to 150
x 100 before running the clever stuff so you should be able to run it out of
the box.

If anyone's got any clues I'd be very appreciative.

Turrah,

Antony Briggs