I setup a new SWF file in Flash Professional and imported the video to stage. I chose to create keyframes for each frame of the video, set the JPG compression rate to 100 and then exported the video as a SWF. This was the only method I could find that would make the video loop seamlessly. It solved one problem but introduced another.

As the application ran I monitored the memory usage and soon discovered that the application ate up more and more memory for each time the video looped. To solve this problem I forced the garbage collector to run each time the video completed a loop. This kept the memory usage stable and the application has now been running for about a month.

This is how you run the garbage collector:

System.gc()

The bug is related to adding custom application icons. You do this by editing the application’s xml file. To be more precise, at the lines which looks like these:

<!-- The icon to display for the file type. Optional. -->
<icon>
   <image16x16>icon_16.png</image16x16>
   <image32x32>icon_32.png</image32x32>
   <image48x48>icon_48.png</image48x48>
   <!--image128x128></image128x128-->
</icon>

The solution to this bug is actually quite simple. Simply comment out the icons you don’t plan to use -just like I have done in the example above. Oh, and be sure to tick the check box “Copy non-embedded files to output folder” in Project -> Properties -> Flex Compiler.