I’ve stumbled on another one of those “everyone wants to do it, but nobody knows how” issues in Flash: how to disable the controls on the FLVPlayback component.

After quite a bit of documentation-reading, web-searching, and forum-browsing, I’ve come up with a function for easy, on-the-fly toggling of controller-enable-ability.

with a FLVPlayback instance on the stage, add the following to your ActionScript:

mx.video.FLVPlayback.prototype.enableButtons = function(bEnabled:Boolean){
this.skin_mc.seekBar_mc.handle_mc._visible = bEnabled;
if(bEnabled){
this.stopButton =this.skin_mc.stop_mc;
this.backButton = this.skin_mc.back_mc;
this.forwardButton = this.skin_mc.forward_mc;
this.seekBar = this.skin_mc.seekBar_mc;
}else{
this.onEnterFrame = function(){
this.stopButton = this.skin_mc.stop_mc.disabled_mc
this.backButton = this.skin_mc.back_mc.disabled_mc;
this.forwardButton = this.skin_mc.forward_mc.disabled_mc;
this.seekBar = null;
updateAfterEvent();
delete this.onEnterFrame;
}
}
}

Now, for a bit of explanation:

The first step is to simply toggle the visibility of the SeekBar handle. With it invisible, there is no way the user can use it, and this seems to be the simplest solution, rather than digging through the MC structure of a component skin and figuring out how that handle is, uh, handled. So, the bEnabled value can double as the visibility value for the handled: true (visible) for enabled buttons, or false (invisible) for disabled.

For the rest of the buttons, it’s not so simple. Users have come to expect a “ghosted” or “grayed-out” appearance for a disabled button, so simply removing them as we did with the scrollbar handle would be bad form. Luckily, the pre-made skin SWFs for the FLVplayback component include disabled states for everything, and we can use these.

Because the component skins use bitmap caching and 9-slice scaling to maximize their flexibility, simply setting the button properties to the disabled MC won’t work, and it requires a bit more of a brute-force approach to get those buttons to appear. Hence, the onEnterFrame and updateAfterEvent() commands. updateAfterEvent() forces an update of the stage, so it will make those disabled-states appear, but it only works as part of a clip event, such as onEnterFrame. So we wrap the whole thing in an onEnterFrame, and then delete the onEnterFrame function to save on processing and memory.

I should note that I developed this using the SteelExternalAll.swf skin. The documentation indicates that the skins are built using a universal structure, so it should work for any of them, but I’m not making any promises.

, , , ,