Flash Player stops animating when out of viewport

Question

I have several flash movies on a site. They all loop through an animation which lasts for approximately 15 seconds (but this is not set in stone). They all begin to play at the

Answer 1

You can't disable this feature. It's put in place to lower the memory and CPU use when the flash application isn't visible.

What is available for you though is something called the Throttle API. This is a dedicated API created to allow creators of Flash applications the ability to be notified exactly when their application is going to be slowed down/throttled.

Here's an example.

addEventListener(ThrottleEvent.THROTTLE, onThrottleEventHandler);

function onThrottleEventHandler(e:ThrottleEvent):void
{
    if(e.state == ThrottleType.THROTTLE)
    {
        /**
         * the player is about to be slowed down to a frame rate
         * set in e.targetFrameRate
         */
    }
    else if(e.state == ThrottleType.PAUSE)
    {
        /**
         * the player is going to be paused completely, AKA 0 fps
         */
    }
    else if(e.state == ThrottleType.RESUME)
    {
        /**
         * the player is now back to normal as it has resumed
         * from the paused or throttled state
         */
    }
}

Now you can figure out a way that works best for you but my suggestion is to store the current time that has passed whenever being throttled or paused via:

currentTime = getTimer();

Then calculate how much time has passed once your application has resumed using:

passedTime = getTimer() - currentTime;

Then do what you like with this information.

Hopefully this has helped, should offer you a greater degree of control now that you're familiar with the Throttle API. For more information on it, check it out in the documentation here: ThrottleEvent