Flash player inside HTML control

[imdfl]

Platform: Adobe AIR Flash application for desktop

Component: Flex HTML control hosting an HTML page

The page needs to display video content. When a Flash player is installed on the machine, the video is rendered. When there's no flash player, the video panel shows a link for downloading the Flash player.

Since this thing is running inside a flash player to begin with, I'm hoping to find a way to avoid the dependency on the external flash player. The <video> tag seems not to be implemented. Any idea how I can display Flash content inside the html page?

thanks

[Amrita Gangwani]

Hi,

This was a feature implementation done with AIR version 22. Please, read "System level Flash Player support for AIR desktop applications" on page Flash Player and AIR 22 Release Notes

"Starting in AIR 22, applications that play swf content via the HTML control (WebKit) will now load the system level NPAPI Flash Player provided by Adobe (https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer).  If this plugin is not available on the system, the end user will be prompted to download and install the plugin from Adobe"

Thanks!

[imdfl]

Thanks for the quick info

Does this mean that if I compile against AIR 21 or lower I'll get video playback regardless of the system player status?

[Amrita Gangwani · Accepted solution]

Using AIR 21 for compiling a captive application might help you with not installing plugin separately. But, if you package a captive application with latest AIR version after embedding a plugin, it might work as well. This workaround won't work for native and shared applications when using latest runtime on your system. In that case, a substitute plugin would be searched on your system, if not found you will be prompted to install one.

[imdfl]

Indeed I'm packaging an application with captive AIR runtime. What did you mean by "embedding a plugin"?

[Amrita Gangwani]

By embedding I mean by installing a plugin as stated in the release notes.

[imdfl]

Thanks. I have no idea what you mean by this, the release notes don't mention embedding a flash player. The only reference in this respect is the sentence "If this plugin is not available on the system, the end user will be prompted to download and install the plugin from Adobe."

However, reverting to SDK 21 did the trick and I recommend this solution for anyone whose application needs to play video/flash content inside an HTML control. Thanks again.

[imdfl]

BTW, any chance of getting an insight into the rationale behind this change?
I'm delivering a captive app explicitly so that it's independent on external resources, sure to run as long as its properly installed. This new dependency on the NPAPI plugin undermines the very purpose of the captive format. Vulnerabilities in the Flash player don't count as a reason because the same could be said about the entire frozen version of AIR.

[omclouduser]

I agree with imdfl in that it makes the captive runtime feature completely useless. What is the meaningful reason for this change?

Is there a way to force using the Flash Player bundled with the captive runtime? If not, then it would make sense to introduce such an option at least on the command line tools of the AIR SDK.