preloaders

You can make a bandwidth-friendly preloader by having an swf in place of your main swf movie. for example, if you make an swf that has a loadmovie action on the first frame you can make the last frame have a gotoandplay(2) in order to return the read head without calling the movie a second time. for example:

|a| = keyframe with action script
|*| = keyframe with text

|a| | |*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |a|
L O A D I N G . . .
/\___________________________________________________/\
loadmovie action_______________________________________gotoandplay(2)

This method is very effective and has very small filesize. It even works if your website does not support flash. Of course, it won't be able to monitor download progress like a root_framesloaded % job would, but it gets the point across and looks clean.

Email me if you want me to send an example .fla file and it's linked movie file. - URL