Synicing several flash files to start at the same time

Hi,

Im working on a site which incorperates several flash movies on one html page.

I realy want all these flash movies to start at the same time so they fade out in sync.

http://www.waresdesign.com/sports

I cant seem to find any command in flash to start a seperate flash movie playing but im sure that there is one.

I have thought about 2 ways of achieving this but am not sure which is the best way. The first is to have an extra movie that checks to see if the others have loaded then when all 4 have loaded it then starts them all at the same time.

The other way is to have each movie send a variable when it is loaded, then when all the variables are checked a start function is sent either via javascript or php.

can anyone help me with this or do you know any usefull tutorials that i could use?

cheers,