User Guide

Using Shockwave Player 601
Testing your movie
However you select to create your movie, test it thoroughly before releasing it to the public. Make
sure you test on systems with all common types of Internet connections, especially on slow
modems and at busy times of day. The following list describes things you might want to check
before distributing your movie over the Internet; remember, however, that each movie has its own
special needs:
Compare a streaming version of the movie to a nonstreaming version to see if the performance
is different. Some smaller movies might work better without streaming playback.
Verify that all linked media elements appear correctly. To see if the movie correctly handles an
error, try forcing the linked media elements to fail.
Run the movie on all systems your users are likely to have. For the general public, this includes
Windows 95, 98, and NT as well as Mac OS 8.x and 9.
Run the movie on slow modem connections and on fast T3 connections; problems can arise
from fast as well as slow connections.
Check for display problems on systems set to 8-, 16-, 24-, and 32-bit color. Also test as many
types of monitors and display adapters as you can.
Check for font mapping problems in your movie. If your movie uses nonstandard fonts, use
embedded fonts. See “Embedding fonts in movies” on page 274.
Check for sound problems, particularly if you stream sounds with SWA.
About downloading speed
Developers distributing multimedia over the Internet usually limit file size, primarily because
most users connect at relatively slow speeds. At 28,800 bps, it takes 30 seconds to 1 minute to
download a 60K file. Using streaming playback can help you avoid some of the delays caused by
downloading large files.
Movies and streaming SWA sounds always compete for control of the network, which can cause a
noticeable problem on slower connections.
If there is heavy traffic at the Internet access point or on the Internet host, or if there is network
congestion, the rate drops even lower—to as low as a few hundred bytes per second. In general, it
is a good idea to assume your movies will download at about 2K per second.
The following chart shows theoretical throughput times for modems of different speeds. The
speeds 14,400 and 28,800 bps are common for modems; 64 Kbps and 128 Kbps are the
throughput of an ISDN line; 1.5 Mbps is the throughput of a standard high-speed Internet
connection (T1).
Content 14.4 Kbps 28.8 Kbps 64 Kbps 1.5 Mbps
Small graphics and animation,
30K
30 sec 10 sec 6 sec 1 sec
Small complete movie, 100 to
200K
100 to 200
sec
50 to 100
sec
20 to 40 sec 1 sec
500K movie 500 sec 120 to 240
sec
90 sec 3 sec
1 MB movie -- -- 180 sec 6 sec