In a nutshell, my basic question is: Can movies and sounds be activated in a filemaker app by a script?

As far as I can tell, both filemaker 4.1 and 5.0 (the two versions I currently have) force the user to click a play button on inserted movies and double click on container fields to hear sounds, music, etc.

I ask beacause I have an application I want to build that will require Filemaker to behave sort of like an electronic story book where videos and sounds are activated automatically simply as a result of the user

"turning a page" i.e. clicking a button or link.

I'll be building this with either Developer 4.0 or 5.5 and deploying it as a runtime, duty free app, but I'm not sure yet if I'm going to build it on a Mac or in Windows. What issues will I encounter here? Ideally I'd like to

be able to build this in Developer 4.0 on a Mac. Can I get the desired behavior this way? AND will there be any crossplatform issues with multimedia playback when the final app is run under windows?

Yes...

Assuming your sound files, quicktime movies etc are in a container field (either embedded or linked), create a one-step script which:

Go To Field [select/Perform][ContainerField]

The item in the container field will then play. You can loop through this as well. I did this in a Jukebox file I created some time back before iTunes came out.

On you second question, Developer is not my strong point, but I think you have to bind it in Developer using the operating system it will run in as Developer uses some of the system files in Windows. Happy to be corrected on this latter point.