Director movies play either with the Shockwave Player or through a projector player. The Shockwave Player is a system component that plays movies in web browsers and also outside browsers as stand-alone applications. A projector player can play movies only independently of a web browser.

You can distribute movies as Shockwave content (DCR files), projectors, Shockwave projectors, or protected movies (DXR files). Do not distribute source movies (DIR files) unless you want your users to be able to change the movie in the Director authoring environment.

• Shockwave content is a compressed version of a movie’s data and does not include a player. Shockwave content is created primarily to distribute over the Internet for playback in a web browser. The compressed Shockwave content is useful for distribution on a disk when the movie is contained in a projector. Saving a movie in the Shockwave format removes all information necessary to edit the movie.
• A projector is a movie intended for play outside of a web browser. A projector can include a player (called the standard player), Xtra extensions, multiple casts, and linked media in a single file. A projector can also include several different movie files. Configured in this way, a projector can be a completely stand-alone application.
• A Shockwave projector makes a much smaller projector. A Shockwave projector uses an installed Shockwave Player on the user’s system to play a movie instead of including the player code in the projector itself. If no Shockwave Player is installed on the user’s system, the user must download a copy. A Shockwave projector is excellent for Internet distribution of movies that you don’t intend to play in a web browser.

  You can also reduce the file size of a projector by turning on projector options that compress the movie data, the player code, or both. In Windows, compressing the player code reduces the minimum projector size from approximately 2.1 MB to 1.1 MB for a projector, and to about 60K for a Shockwave projector.

  On the Mac, compressing the player code reduces the minimum projector size from approximately 2.5 MB to 1.2 MB for a projector, and to approximately 12K for a Shockwave projector.

• Protected movies (DXR files) are uncompressed movies that users can’t open for editing. These can be useful when you want to distribute uncompressed movies on a disk, but you don’t want users to edit the source file. Protected movies might play faster than Shockwave content from a disk because they do not need to be decompressed. These movies are preferable if disk space isn’t limited. Like Shockwave content, protected movies do not include the information necessary to edit the movie or the software that plays the movie. They can be played only by a projector, a movie in a window, or the Shockwave Player.