XML-Based Video Playlist not playing properly when in Captivate.

Question

This is kind of a complicated question so I hope I put this in the appropriate category. We want to make a Captivate Project in which each slide of the project has one Flash SWF, "videoplayer1.swf", on it. The Flash SWF will do three things:

1. Determine the Captivate Slide Number that it is located on.

2. Load an external XML file (playlist.xml) that has the locations of videos.

3. Play the Appropriate Video as a Progressively-Downloaded FLV based on the slide number.

We successfully got this to work! Hooray for now! In the Captivate Project, we added numerous slides each with an instance of the Flash SWF on it and each slide played the appropriate video. In fact we even got the Flash SWF to have buttons that contol the Captivate Project so that if the user presses a pause, play, next or back button in the Flash SWF, the Videos AND the Captivate Timeline pause, play, skip, or back.

Next (and here's where the problem begins), we duplicated the Flash SWF and did 2 things to it:

1. We swapped the background on the stage to a different image.

2. We moved the location of the Video Playback Component to a different area on the stage.

We saved this Flash SWF out as a new File "videoplayer2.swf." Please note, we didn't change any of the code. Now when we added "videoplayer1.swf" and "videoplayer2.swf" to various slides in the Captivate Project, the video playback is all wonky.

For example, we created a Project with Slides 1 and 2 loading "videoplayer2.swf" and Slides 3, 4, and 5 loading videoplayer1.swf." The first slide plays the appropriate video but Slide 2 doesn't play any video (even though we confirmed that the correct video is grabbed in the xml). The rest of the slides in the project play fine. However, if we click back and navigate to the start of the project, neither Slides 1 or 2 will play the video properly.

Can anyone figure out what might be going on? I can add sample code files if needed. I've had another person check the ActionScript and can't find a fault in it or the XML. I don't know why it would work when we only have one Flash SWF per slide and go all wonky when we add more than one Flash SWF. Shouldn't the Flash SWF's be indepentent of each other in the Captivate Project if they are on different slides?

Thanks for the help. I know this is starting to get a bit complicated.

IGITI

www_cpguru_com · Answer

Hi IGITI,Sounds strange to me. I think that it might have to do with a bug in Captivate that can occur when you have multiple SWFs imported into a project. Essentially they will all load on your first slide (even though you don't see it) and mess up everything.A solution to the problem could be to create a loader shell in Flash that actually loads your "videoplayer1.swf" into the appropriate Captivate slide. I use these types of loaders all the time to circumvent these weird problems in Captivate. I don't know how it will work with your files though because it seems to be a pretty complicated Flash file and you would probably also need to chance some of your existing code since the paths from your videoplayer to the Captivate variables will change (it will get another _parent).Let me know if it works out for you./MichaelVisit my Captivate blog with tips & tricks, tutorials and Widgets.

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