Adobe Director technical question.

December 10, 2003 5:22 AM

This might be a little too specific, but does anyone know of a method to force a CD drive to spin continuously while running a Director app? [more inside]

I often make Director presentations on CD-rom (yes, someone is still doing it!) that need to display mpeg videos. If there is music playing on the CD-rom as well, and the CD drive has 'spun down', the music tends to stutter for a second or two as the drive spins up to retrieve the video.

I've tried a number of (increasingly "creative") methods to keep the drive spinning, but to no avail.

I'm thinking that there must be some kind of VB script or Director Xtra that does this, but I'm having trouble tracking something down.

C'mon Metafilter, gimme some of that sweet, sweet pep

posted by backOfYourMind to computers & internet (7 answers total)

Google -> TechTV -> Answer.

>:-D
posted by shepd at 5:30 AM on December 10, 2003

Thanks shepd. I had actually come across this before, but I'm not sure it's going to be suitable.

Ideally I'm after something a bit less 'intrusive' (ie that doesn't require anything to be installed on the user's machine as the presentations I'm making are pretty much throwaway items), but this is definitely worth a closer look.
posted by backOfYourMind at 5:52 AM on December 10, 2003

They do give you the source code... I'm sure you could figure out a way to make it do just what you need it to do.

Then again, my programming skills are firmy rooted in classroom COBOL and RPG.
posted by shepd at 6:22 AM on December 10, 2003

Ah, well my programming skills are just "firmly rooted", so I'm afraid that's a bit out of my league ; )
posted by backOfYourMind at 6:38 AM on December 10, 2003

I don't even know what director is, but couldn't you set up a thread or timer that read a sector or extent (that's physically close to the content you want to read eventually, to minimise seek times) until video playing time is there? (you might need to flush the cache or read different parts every time to avoid caching.
posted by fvw at 7:00 AM on December 10, 2003

I had been trying to use the BuddyAPI Xtra to periodically check whether a (non-existant) file was on the CD, to keep the CD spinning, but that seemed to have no effect.

To the best of my knowledge, Director doesn't allow you to read a specific section of a CD.
posted by backOfYourMind at 7:22 AM on December 10, 2003

specific section, specific predetermined file, it doesn't really matter does it? How about reading one extent (2048 bytes) of the video in question per second? That should keep it spinning unless it aggressively readaheads.
posted by fvw at 10:02 AM on December 10, 2003