Random restarts

I’m having an odd problem. I’m new to flash, and I’ve made a preposterously large video that is pretty much just a slideshow with occassional animations. The pictures are huge (in file size), taken right from a digital camera and shrunk to 770 by 560. I made the video for a friend, not to put on the internet.

Anyway. The video keeps restarting after about two minutes. I put it into an html file using Dreamweaver, and it will suddenly go back to the start for absolutely no reason. It won’t do this at the exact same spot every time. Every run, it will make it a few pictures farther, but then restart. Anybody know what might be going on? Thanx much for any ideas.

Minor update: I tried running the video just in flash player, and though it made it a lot farther, it still restarted. I imagine that it will make it the whole way eventually, but I’d most prefer to not have to tell my friend, “Okay, so, run it about eleven times while you’re not in the room, and then come back and watch it.” Aaaargh!

try putting a preloader on it, so it loads up everything before it starts

Nope, that didn’t work. It’s on my harddrive, so it just loads up instantly. The video is 26MB, by the way. Maybe I should load the pictures dynamically, rather than putting them into the library? That’s terribly depressing, as that will take forever and I’d really hoped to be done with this by tomorrow. Or maybe I should break up the video into separate parts that will somehow load each other when each one is done? Assuming that doesn’t take very long, either. Anyone else know of something that might help me? Please?

Also, the video begins to run more slowly as it goes along, sort of. I have all of the pictures fading in and out, going from alpha 0 and up and back down and such, and as the video goes farther along, it starts skipping the fade in. It seems like the computer is having a harder time loading each picture. There’s got to be some setting I can change to fix this, something better than setting the video into many different parts. Not that I even know that will work. Has anyone else had a problem similar to this?