What is the default value for quality in Flash?
When embedding Flash movies, you can specify a parameter that indicates the "quality" of the movie playback. This generally affects whether the Flash runtime anti-aliases your shapes and your video content. More details here .
Does anyone know the default value for this parameter? Adobe did not respect the default. Empirically, it appears to be "high" or "automatic" on Mac and Windows (regardless of browser), but I can't tell which one.
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In conclusion: the empirical default for the quality parameter is "high" rather than "automatic".
The code Andi Li provided was a good start, but it doesn't really tell you if the setting is "high" and "automatic". Autohigh will change the quality of the movie in real time as the frame rate changes. If the frame rate falls below a certain threshold, the Flash runtime will change the quality to "low".
I used the following code snippet, which uses heuristics to determine if the parameter is "high" or "automatic", drawing hard and expecting the quality reported by the stage to go from "high" to "low". If it doesn't go over, it means that the quality is high, not automatically.
Running this code in an inline without a specified quality parameter (so it will use the default) had a measured quality value of high (not automatic) on the following platforms:
OS: Win XP, Win 7, OSX
Browsers: IE6, IE7, IE8, FF3, FF3.5, Safari 3, Safari 4, Safari 4 on Windows XP
Flash versions: 9.0.28, 9.0.124 and Flash 10 (release , not debug versions)
Here's an experiment:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute" creationComplete="onCreationComplete();">
<mx:Script>
<![CDATA[
import mx.containers.Box;
import mx.controls.Alert;
private var boxes:Array = [];
public function onCreationComplete():void {
this.qualityValue.text = this.systemManager.stage.quality;
for (var i:int = 0; i < 2500; i++) {
var box:Box = new Box();
box.width = 300;
box.height = 300;
box.x = 200 + i;
box.y = i;
this.addChild(box);
boxes.push(box);
}
}
private function onEnterFrame(event:Event):void {
for each (var box:Box in boxes)
box.setStyle("backgroundColor", Math.random() * 100000);
this.qualityValue.text = this.systemManager.stage.quality;
}
private function beginSlowdown():void {
this.systemManager.stage.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, onEnterFrame);
}
]]>
</mx:Script>
<mx:VBox>
<mx:Label text="Quality:"></mx:Label>
<mx:Label id="qualityValue"></mx:Label>
<mx:Button click="beginSlowdown()" label="Begin slowdown"></mx:Button>
<mx:Label id="output"></mx:Label>
</mx:VBox>
</mx:Application>
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According to SWFObject default high (for them): http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject/
This page does not indicate: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/127/tn_12701.html .
Any reason you can't just specify what value you want and clear all doubts? I wouldn't be surprised if this happened between browsers and player versions (6-10). But then I wouldn't be surprised if it is consistent and not documented. :)
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When you create a Flex project in Flex Builder, the generated html template (index.template.html) shows high quality (using Flex SDK 3.3).
In Flash CS4, the default in the publish setting (html) is also large.
As Jim said, you can show the value of quality at runtime. A regular AS3 project you can use stage.quality
. For Flex, here's an example:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute" initialize="init();">
<mx:Script>
<![CDATA[
import mx.controls.Alert;
public function init():void {
Alert.show(this.systemManager.stage.quality);
}
]]>
</mx:Script>
</mx:Application>
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