How to Remove the Black Flash that Happens on Some Windows Machines when MPEG Files are Loaded and Unloaded

In some Windows machines there is a black flash frame that appears at the beginning and the end of MPEG playback, in DTS mode. This black flash is a characteristic of using the hardware acceleration features of DirectX, and occurs when an YUV overlay surface is being created by your video driver, in order to optimize playback using hardware accelerated features in your video card.

One way to remove this flash is to reduce hardware acceleration features in the video driver, but this is not practical or desireable since it affects performance. However it should be possible to hide the flash by delaying the exhibition of the video until content has been rendered.

In Mpeg Advance Xtra a developer can hide this artifact by using the visible of sprite property. Just drop the following behavior over the video sprite, and it will take care of changing the visible of sprite at startup and end of sprite spans, hiding possible black flashes caused by redraws of the video overlay window.

property pHidden on beginsprite me sprite(me.spritenum).visible = false pHidden = true end on endsprite me sprite(me.spritenum).visible = false --the next two lines are required for Director to update the stage the stagecolor = the stagecolor updatestage end on prepareFrame me if pHidden then if sprite(me.spritenum).currenttime > 0 then pHidden = false sprite(me.spritenum).visible = true end if end if end