Using the masks for videohotspot

Hi,

there should be normally no difference between 1.0.8.15 and 1.16 here...
The hotspot and masking code is still the same...

Quote from Taurus

Why using option mask="hotspot [maskspot]" strongly inhibits video player?

This is related to the Flashplayer - using mask on constantly changing elements is extremely inefficient.
The mask setting itself is only a thin-layer to the Flashplayer natives mask setting.

The Flashplayer works internally roughly this way when mask was used:

1. both involved objects will be rastered to bitmaps
   
   
   • this can be very cpu-intensive when the objects are large
   • distorted hotspots can be get very large at certain viewing angle - there is no screen-clipping involved here
   • the size of these resulting bitmaps is limited (the exact size depends on the Flash version), when the size would be too large no masking operation will be applied
2. after then both objects will be mixed together using the mask
3. then the result will be shown

And this process is just slow - recreating bitmaps every frame, full rastering and the mixing...

When looking for performance I would recommend not use mask at all (btw - not to confuse the maskchildren - the newer maskchildren setting is much more efficient here, but limited to rectangle masking of layer/plugin elements).

Preprocessing the video and mixing it there with pano-background would be the much more efficient solution (and would work for html5 too).

Best regards,
Klaus