TechNote (Archived)

"Playing Director Movies Separately From Their Content"

IssueI'd like to leave most of my media on the CD-ROM while my projector plays from the user's hard drive.

SolutionHere are some tips on how to play your Director movie from a hard disk while keeping its content on the CD-ROM:

1	Make sure linked cast members are all on one volume, and save the movie onto the same volume. This allows a relative pathname to be constructed at playback.
2	In the movie script, determine the drive letter of the CD-ROM, probably using a custom XObject.
3	Construct a string starting with the drive letter of the CD-ROM, and the rest of the path duplicating the directory hierarchy where the movie was saved. This allows the relative paths constructed in the first step to remain usable.
4	setAt the searchPath, 1, <<the constructed string>> This tells Director to search for files on the CD-ROM, beginning at the named directory.If some of your content or subsidiary movies are on the hard disk, you will want to search the hard disk first, before looking at the CD-ROM. Most likely, these searches will be relative to the directory that the movie was launched from. This is how the searching will work, as set up above.If you know that all your content and subsidiary movies are on the CD-ROM, you can dispense with searching the hard disk, saving at least one disk access:
5	set the searchCurrentFolder to FALSEThis will bypass searches relative to the current directory before scanning through the searchPath.