Animated buttons - keeping movie playing after mouseOff

Hello,

I am trying to make an animated button where the mouseOver action starts a movie that completes irrespective of whether the mouse actually stays over the buttons. I can create buttons where the movieClip starts on mouseOver and stops/reverts back to start on mouseOff (not sure of correct terminology here!), but not where the movie goes to the end even though the mouse has moved away.

I have tried several tutorials downloaded from the internet, but can't seem to get them to work.Sometimes Flash keeps telling me the scripting is wrong, but when I try and make corrections accordingly Flash repeats the debugging message as nothing has been changed. I don't know actionScript well enough to do this from scratch myself, so some advice would be most welcome.

It seems like such a simple thing to do - there must be some way I can manage it!

Thanks

use an mc rather than a button - they are much more powerful - like this:

Thanks for the code. I tried it and came up with the following error messages from Flash. I hope I put the code in the right places!

Scene=Scene 1, Layer=main, Frame=1: Line 1: You must export your movie as Flash 5 to use this action.
about_mc.onRollOver=function()

Scene=Scene 1, Layer=main, Frame=1: Line 3: You must export your movie as Flash 5 to use this expression.
this.play();

Scene=Scene 1, Layer=main, Frame=1: Line 1: Statement must appear within onClipEvent handler
about_mc.onRollOver=function()

I am using Flash MX (which doesn't seem to want to let me save down to Flash 5), if that makes any difference.

what are you exporting as? (see File/Publish Settings/Flash)

The settings (File/Publish Settings/Flash) I have at the moment are:

Version: FlashPlayer4

Load Order: Bottom up

Options: (none chosen)

Jpeg quality: 50

and that's it..

you'll have to export as 5 at least, 6 is better - you could it as flash 4 but the syntax is totally different.

the movieClip.onEvent syntax is new to MX and it's new event model. Don't forget to give your clips instance names, otherwise your script will fail.