Adobe Director movies can use the Internet in various ways: hosting multiuser sessions such as chats and games, streaming movies and sounds, retrieving data from the network, and interacting with a browser. Whether it is distributed on disk or downloaded from the Internet, a movie can use an active network connection to retrieve linked files, send information, open web pages, and perform many other network activities.

To make a movie appear in a user’s browser, you can save it as Shockwave content and embed it in an HTML document. The movie can play from a local disk or an Internet server. When the user opens the HTML document stored on an Internet server, the movie often begins streaming to the user’s system, and begins playing when either a specified number of frames has been downloaded, or waits until all of the movie is downloaded to the local disk. (The movie begins streaming if you have set the Shockwave streaming playback option to on. If the default streaming option is left at off, the movie begins playing after the entire movie has been downloaded to the local drive. For more information, see Setting movie playback options.)

You can also distribute a movie over the Internet as a projector (a packaged movie that the user downloads and executes). A projector plays as a stand-alone application, not in a browser. For more information, see About Distribution formats.

When you author a movie, consider how the movie is to be distributed and played on users’ systems. If the movie streams from an Internet source, you might need to modify the movie for the best streaming performance and use the behaviors that are built into Director to make the movie wait while certain cast members download. Controls and script methods offer ways to send and retrieve media and other information, to interact with a browser, and to monitor downloading.