Hi,
Thank you for your enquiry.
In my experience, AVI files are not best suited for streaming purposes and the entire file must be pulled from CD-ROM before the media player can show the first frame, hence the delay you are experiencing.
You also state that you are using AVI files to ensure that your end-user does not need to install additional software to view the file, but this is a potentially flawed strategy. As you may be aware, AVI files are encoded and decoded using algorithms (more commonly known as codecs). You have obviously used one of the codecs installed on your system to encode the original video file, but are you certain that this is a standard AVI codec supplied with all versions of Windows? For example, many screen capture utilities (such as Techsmith's Camtasia -
www.techsmith.com) use their own proprietary codec to create high-quality, but heavily-compressed, video, but unless your end-user has installed this same codec, they will be unable to view your videos.
A much better solution would be to use standard MPEG-1 video files. These should stream much more effectively from CD-ROM and can be viewed by all Windows users without additional software (as the Microsoft MPEG-1 decoder has been included in all versions of Windows since Windows 95). The only downside with MPEG-1 video is that the file sizes will be much larger than the same video in AVI format.
The black screen you are seeing when the page displayed is the video overlay onto which Media Player 'projects' the video data. If you wish to eliminate this, simply open the properties of the video object, select
Change under the Video Type options and set the video mode to
Rendered. This will allow Opus to use Media Player as a frameserver and treat each frame of the video as a separate image, which should ensure instant playback.
Kind regards,