loading and preloading

[hewitttwin2]

Hi
I'm interested in knowing the difference between loading a movie and preloading. I have made an animated site with 5 movies at around 300 k each. At present I have a loading animation for each section, but I feel these movies take to long to download. I would appreciate any ideas, and would preloading the movies work any better, or loading the music. swf in seperately
Thanks for any assistance
kate

[Jesse]

preloading is just bufferring, stopping the movie playing while we load some of the content. orriginally it was used to keep sound and visuals streaming in sync but now ppl use it to buffer up their 3Mb flash files which I personally think is a dumb move.
you might want to consider this thread http://www.actionscripts.org/forums/showthread.php3?threadid=2790 which has the source for my seuquential preloader. it basically loads the first bit of content then uses the idle bandwidth to preload later bits. also see the preloader tutorial if you haven't already.