presenter getting hung up and not working with any browser

[paymakr]

As of a few days ago a large number of my students are suddenly reporting that my course lessons are not loading/opening The lessons are contained on a CD-ROM, from which they can successfully access the course menu, however, when they click into a lesson the lesson attempts to load on screen in adobe presenter (which opens the lesson in an internet browser) but hangs with a blank gray screen.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Jorma_at_CoSo]

Is this a new disk of presentations or one that has been used for a while? Or to put it another way, did your CD's content change or the students computers?

[paymakr]

It's a disc that I've been distributing for over a year with virtually no issues until this week. So my feeling is that something changed (security update possibly?) with Internet Explorer recently that is preventing the lessons from playing correctly.

[paymakr]

Just had another student email me and he believes the problem started when his computer updated to the latest version of Adobe Flash Player.

"Just starting using this a few weeks ago. No issues, worked fine. A few days ago it stopped working. Lesson screens open with 'Abode Presenter' along with spinning green circle that spins forever and nothing else happens...Windows 7 x64, tried with IE, Chrome and Firefox - all with same issue once Adobe Flash player went to new version 23.0.0.162"

[zeeshan_hussain · Accepted solution]

Hi Scott,

We are investigating the issue extensively which has been introduced as part of latest flash player update.

However, if it is really urgent for you i can suggest you some workarounds:

1. If you play the SWF content from a server instead of playing it locally, it will work fine for you. You can play it from a web server or a wamp server etc.

2. If in case you do not want to go with above workaround, here is another one: Press Windows key +R  and type in %appdata% and hit enter key. Go to the folder " ........\appdata\Roaming\Macromedia\Flash Player\#Security\FlashPlayerTrust" and open the file named as "TalkToAdobeFlashPlayerTrust.cfg" and add the location of your Presenter publish output folder and save the file in same location.

For eg. in my case i added this entry- "C:\Users\zhussain\Documents\My Adobe Presentations". Once you have done the change to this file, you will be able to play your SWF output locally in Internet Explorer and Firefox. Remember this will still not work for Chrome browser.

kindly let me know if you need any further help.

Regards,

Zeeshan

[susanr25817473]

Zeeshan,

Do you have any idea when this flash/browser issue may be resolved?

Thanks,

Susan

[paymakr]

Hi Zeeshan,

Can you please provide a timeline for how long it will take Adobe to resolve this issue? I have many students this very moment who cannot access the content (content is contained on a CD), their progress in the course has been halted, and most are getting frustrated with the whole experience. Beyond providing the workarounds that are complex and somewhat difficult to follow non-technical folks, I am powerless to help my students. These are my customers and from this thread I gather there are many others, all who deserve a sense as to when this might be resolved. Thanks for your prompt attention.

[zeeshan_hussain]

Hi Scott,

As i mentioned earlier, this is not a bug but a security enhancement that has come from the Adobe Flash team in the latest flash player updated version.

However, for your case, since the content has been distributed to students via CD and the only option you are looking for is to play the content locally without making any of the above mentioned workarounds, i would suggest you to ask your students to play the content via stand alone flash player.

Link to download the standalone flash player- https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/23/flashplayer_23_sa.exe

Once downloaded, you can open the viewer.swf file in the published output folder of your project using this standalone player.

Regards,

Zeeshan Hussain
Adobe Presenter Engineering Team

[rsbisa]

Zeeshan,

I am having the same problem. Earlier this year, I was able to use a solution similar to your Solution 2 (%appdata%...) and it worked. However, my company just changed our OS to Windows 10. Now, I no longer have a "TalkToAdobeFlashPlayerTrust.cfg" file in the FlashPlayerTrust directory. I attempted to make my own and add the correct path to my Presenter presentation folder, but that did not work. Is there a different workaround, or way to modify this workaround to make it work?

[Jorma_at_CoSo]

try setting the trusted location here: Adobe - Flash Player : Settings Manager - Global Security Settings panel

[c15651531]

Any news? It still doesn't work...

Thanks

[rsbisa]

Not to my knowledge. The prescribed workaround(s) were simply too impractical when delivering output to a lay-customer. And, if the customers are to distribute the Presenter show to hundreds of desktops from their own Intranet - with the accompanying "try-and-see" workaround instructions for every would-be viewer - that's just a bridge too far.

Rendering the output to HTML5 instead of .swf, and then deploying from a server seems to be the only practical solution. The upside of this is the show is viewable from iOS mobile devices.

[DasBeef]

Zeeshan,

We are having the same issue with publishing locally from Presenter 10. We can not preview local publish files. We get the spinning green arrow/circle in all browsers.

Also, I  tried editing "TalkToAdobeFlashPlayerTrust.cfg" file to add additional local content folder as trusted space as suggested and still can not get content to play locally.

This is a very frustrating issue and makes testing and reviewing training content to be published into Adobe Connect challenging. Please fix this.

Steve

zeeshanhussain​

[Riverpebbles101]

Is there a timeline for resolution to this issue?  We are unable to publish and view any courses at my company.  We are dead in the water with the fix you suggest.

[zeeshan_hussain]

Hi Lynn,

Currently published out from SWF only has issue when played locally.

When uploading published content to an LMS or playing the content from a server, there should not be any problem.

Could you please let me know what is serving as a blocker at your end?

Regards,

Zeeshan Hussain

Adobe Presenter Engineering Team

[Riverpebbles101]

We are a centralized corporate education department for a large US company. We create the courses and typically sit them in a shared drive that the SME authors and reviewers all access to review the drafts and final versions to give approval prior to loading into our LMS. We have no Web Server access for this purpose. We do not load into the LMS prior to approval due to re-versioning and version tracking.

The other option is not available since almost all computer users in our company do not have admin rights to make any changes.  We are attempting to find another work around, but it would be helpful to know if the issue is going to be fixed relatively soon or if it is going to be a long time.

[zeeshan_hussain]

Hi Lynn,

I would suggest you to go through the release notes for the latest flash player update. Link- Release Notes Flash Player 23 AIR 23

Kindly go through the content under the section- "Disabling local-with-filesystem access in Flash Player by default", its "background" and "workaround for legacy content".

Let me know if you need any further details.

Regards,
Zeeshan Hussain

Adobe Presenter Engineering Team

[DasBeef]

Awesome Zeeshan!

The fixes recommended inRelease Notes Flash Player 23 AIR 23 worked.  Was able to use the following "Workarounds for Legacy Content" section to successfully publish and view local Presenter content for more rapid review prior to uploading to Adobe Connect server. Thanks!

Workarounds for Legacy Content:

We highly recommend that you only circumvent these controls to enable content from sources that they trust.

For Individuals:
For Internet Explorer, Edge, Firefox, Opera and Safari:
On the affected system, go to the Flash Player Settings Manager:
• Mac: System Preferences > Flash Player
• Windows: Control Panel > Flash Player
Select the Advanced tab
In the Developer Tools section, click the Trusted Location Settings button
Click the "Add..." button and add relevant files and folders to the list

For Google Chrome (and other PPAPI browsers):
Navigate to the Settings Manager page
Choose Edit Locations > Add Locations from the popup list
In the text field that appears, type or paste the file/folder path that you'd like to trust
Click the "Confirm" button
Note: Please be aware that the "Browse for files" and "Browse for folder" buttons do not function properly. You must manually type or copy/paste your path into the text field above the buttons to add the file or folder to the trusted list.

[lisay12192489]

Thank you for this post, as we are having the same issue.

[susanr25817473]

Zeeshan,

Last week I implemented the "work around" that you suggested in this thread, and I was able to publish locally and launch without issue.  Today I rebooted my machine and the "workaround" no longer works. Additionally, any content I have published since the flash update wont launch on our LMS either. (On a server).

Can you let us know when Adobe will have this problem fixed.  It is a big issue for our organization.

Thank you,

Susan

[zeeshan_hussain]

Hi Susan,

I would suggest you to go through the work around mentioned in Release Notes Flash Player 23 AIR 23

Also, if your SWF content is not working after uploading it to LMS, it will not be a flash issue.

Which LMS are you using? You can drop me a mail privately to zhussain@adobe.com

Please send me a published SWF output of your project using dropbox.

Also, it will be great if you could send me a link to the course you have published on your LMS to debug the issue.

Also i would like to mention again that preventing SWF content from playing locally on your machine, is not actually an issue but a web security enhancement.

Regards,
Zeeshan Hussain
Adobe Presenter Engineering Team

[Riverpebbles101]

While I appreciate that this was a security enhancement and not a bug, I would like you to confirm that this is now the normal for using Presenter 11 and viewing locally and that there is NO plan to make any changes. I do not want to go down a path with our company to do major changes to computer setups if this is going to be changed in the future.  We also use Captivate and Articulate products in addition to Presenter.  We are not experiencing the issue with them. So I am unsure why it is just impacting the Presenter product.  It seems to me that this should have been vetted with your own products to lessen the impact to users. Thank you.

[DasBeef]

Agree... this really is ridiculous.

[paymakr]

Thanks for the quick reply, Zeeshan. I'm not comfortable distributing the course on CD and then requiring students to download the standalone player. Users are fickle and won't react well to this extra step and I fear there will be too much abandonment if that is a requirement. Additionally, one of the biggest benefits of the the course that I often hear from my students is that getting started is so seamless: Simply insert the disc, no registering of your name/email required, no account creation required, you don't have to install anything, no ads, no pop-ups, you simply insert the disc and start learning. Now all of that has changed because in order for them to download the standalone player, I'll now have to provide them with that download link somewhere on the disc packaging and hope they can read that long URL correctly & type it out without misspelling anything...what a messy ordeal that will be for them...poor user experience...increased support emails...etc...

I've really enjoyed presenter as a reliable product for creating interactive learning, and normally I'm very encouraged by technological progress, but just not seeing how this is a better user experience or a sustainable model.

[paymakr]

Not sure if anyone is monitoring this anymore, but are folks still experiencing this problem? I haven't had many students report the problem recently, so curious what others are experiencing.

Also, I can understand why SWF files might not work as Flash is an older technology, but wonder why the html5 files aren't working either.