Solving technology problems, one at a time
Symptom: hyperlinks that worked in a Powerpoint file no longer work in the published Presenter or Powerpoint presentation based on that Powerpoint.
This is because Flash Security treats local content differently than the content on the internet.
The solution is to put the published files onto a web server and access it using the URL (like: http://yoursite.com/yourpresentation.htm).
Continue readingFlash Firebug is a great tool for debugging Actionscript 3 SWF files, similar to the way regular Firebug helps debug Javascript and CSS when using Firefox.
But the current version of Flash Firebug, 3.0.3, has a bug that causes it to display this error:
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No SWF files with AS3 detected on this page. You could try reloading the page.
A customer called me the other day with a problem with Adobe Presenter. Video imported onto a slide would not play, no matter whether imported by Powerpoint’s insert functions or through Presenter’s own import functions.
To fix this problem, first update the Flash player to the latest version.
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Captivate 5 removed the need to answer this question: it only publishes in ActionScript 3 format, and correspondingly limits the compatibility of the published SWF file in certain situations as described below.
But if you are using Captivate v. 4 or earlier, you may still be wondering which to choose.
Continue readingThe JW Player is a very popular open-source media player which not only supports many video, audio and image formats, but has many scriptable behaviors. Here we’ll make use of the JavaScript API to generate as many players as you want on a page. The generated players all have separate event listeners to keep them from interfering with each other. Events or actions executed in one player do not affect others.
Article Outline
This is a new version of that was compatible with an earlier version of the JW Player. This one has been updated to work with JW Player 4.7.761 and later.
Sometimes it’s helpful to have a quick reminder of how button events work within nested clips in ActionScript 2.
[ TRY DEMO ]
A button nested inside another button OR inside a MovieClip that has buttonEvents assigned to it will not work. (Button events include: onRollOver, onRollOut, onDragOver, onDragOut, onPress, onRelease and onReleaseOutside).
This is due to the way Flash captures events: the first parent instance with a button event handler assigned to it is the one that is listened to. None of its child objects will be listened for unless you use a workaround.
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This is an example of how to create a javascript-based Playlist selector for a JW FLV player. The playlist selector menu has 3 sections that toggle open and closed when you click on them. This allows the user to switch playlists, choosing from various topics.
The source code has not been cleaned up, but you should be able to get an idea of how to set this up from it.
Continue readingA while back, I worked on a flash game that teaches medical professionals how to find objects in a cardiac cart. A cart with 6 drawers isshown at left. When a drawer is clicked, it slides in from the top of the screen so that all the objects inside can be seen. The object of the game is to drag whichever object has been selected at random to a target at bottom right.
The original design allowed plenty of room for the drawers to move down to their open position without obscuring the target area.
But as time went on and more requirements came to light, the dimensions of the game had to be shortened so that the drawer overlapped the hand target when it was in its “open” position.
Continue readingNOTE: this has been revised to make it more flexible, and allow multiple streamers and multiple video types, using the same code.
This is a script that allows you to add as many JW FLV players to a page as you want, using a single block of code. The players all have separate event listeners to keep them from interfering with each other. Events or actions executed in one player do not affect others.
This particular demo also corrects for a problem we have noticed recently with Red5, where RTMP streams will hang with a “BUFFER.EMPTY” status code. I’ve set up meta-monitoring so that it catches “BUFFER.EMPTY” codes and starts the player up again a little bit previous to the break. It creates player names and function names dynamically, based on how many players you request. If this function seems to be giving you problems, if your videos start jumping back and restarting a lot, search for the following line and comment it out by adding “//” in front of it:
window["player_"+obj.id].sendEvent('SEEK', parseInt(window["positionarray_"+obj.id][3])+100);
We’ve also had problems with some videos that simply refuse to stream, although they will play using progressive download. You can use a mixture of streaming and non-streaming by altering the playlist for each video.
A few months ago, we installed Red5 0.7.0 on a Windows server to stream Flash video inside the firewall. This server is used mainly to stream short clips that are embedded in learning modules.
The JW FLV player v. 4.6 is included in the learning module template and enables us to display the videos with a high degree of flexibility.
Example of a player that contains multiple short video clips.
The player generates a navigation listing on the right from the XML playlist.
