[seen.to]

Anyone have any experience with this?

One of our satellite clinics (our being the children's hospital I work at) wants to use some of our Flash content to educate kids and their parents (which is great since that's why we make them) in places which have either no access to computers or access only to dumb terminals hooked up to servers with no Flash.

We bought them a couple of portable DVD players but now I need to figure out how to get the interactive content onto DVD retaining its interactivity.

I've been searching around and have a few possibilities but if anyone has any actual experience of doing this then your advice would be appreciated.

Cheers.

[niggle]

Interactivity on DVDs is very limited and most DVD players almost certainly won't load and play flash files, if that's what you're looking to do.

[JonoMarshall]

What level of interactivity are you after? You can create a stupid amount of buttons and menu paths in DVD Studio Pro?

[seen.to]

There are several buttons within the Flash which play multiple integrated animations explaining diabetes. We need the end user to be able to 'click' these buttons as though they were viewing the original Flash, thus triggering the animations (and sound).

[seen.to]

Probably should also have mentioned that I'm working on a PC.

[niggle]

It would be pretty straightforward to export the flash animated elements as video files then link them together using DVD authoring software, applying the button puches as you go.

[seen.to]

Sounds feasible cheers. (More work than I was hoping for but hey).

Anyone else?

[Jay_bo]

You should try and find out how interactive games work on a dvd player, if you get what i mean, like deal or no deal, who wants to be a millionaire, they all been put on a dvd to be played in a dvd player

[seen.to]

I've been playing about with exporting video then putting it all together in Adobe Encore. Unfortunately the video quality from a straight export from Flash (possibly down to my limited knowledge with such things) is very poor and the performance of Encore when it comes to actually creating the DVD is ridiculously slow.

I've tried a couple of third-party swf to video converters with much better visual quality results... but they both failed to include the sound.

PITA

[Hinkle]

flash to video can be tricky, especially since flash exports no actionscript animations ( even if you have just a mc on your stage that is triggered by a mc.play() in the timeline , flash wont export it ). if you only used tweens , u can export all frames as an image sequence and put it together in premiere or final cut or something similar. If u have used actionscript, then you cant export it from flash... period.
ive had the same problem and the only solution i found was playing the swf, and using a screencapture tool ( in my case Snapz Pro X, not sure whats good for pc... i hear a lot about Fraps but i havent tried it ) to capture the animation, and export it to something you can use in Encore. The result was surprisingly good tho...

[i3lance]

Haven't really read the above but you can have a very good level of interactivity which are contingent on the following (mostly);

1 - All assets are localised, on the DVD-Rom
2 - Increased interactivity based on a "make sure you have a live net connection to use the following features" disclaimer
3 - Anything that requires "simulated streaming" (all local) or may be accessed more than other elements - a good technique is to preload it as if it was on the web, minimising the start-up of the local DVD drive and whirring...slicker and much more professional that's all, not necessary though.

[seen.to]

No computer for playback unfortunately.

This is proving to be a real pain in the arse.