Found a better method than the PrintJob.send way thanks to Darron Schall. Going off of his suggestion to use ExternalInterface.call per this LiveDoc’s entry, I found it does the same thing as PrintJob.send. It will pause:
- Animations
- onEnterFrame
- intervals
However, sounds (streaming or event) don’t stop, don’t resume upon unpausing, and getTimer keeps on trucking. Additionally, streamed sounds keep animation in sync with them by dropping frames if the animation cannot keep up. Thus, those animations will appear to jerk upon unpausing if the sound has already played past a certain point. This is the same behavior you get with the PrintJob.send method.
At least, in this case, you can customize the popup to be a JavaScript one with a label; that’s a lot better than a mysteriously appearing print dialogue when someone hits the pause button. You could use JavaScript’s prompt function instead.
Both methods are modal, meaning the user cannot interact with the Flash movie while the dialogues are open.
*** Warning: Loud Sound ***
Pause Example – Alert | Prompt | Source (ZIP)
Just a quick note – streamed video also doesn’t stop and will keep playing in the background, though the screen will not update until the dialog is dismissed.