help! How can I get controls for video file in iPDF

[scot cameron]

I 've read here that since 2020 we can no longer have any player controls for video files in my iPDF - Is there a way to do it? Can I embed vimeo or youtube vids into the iPDF instead of the actual video files themselves? Need some sort of fix if there is one. appreciate any help

[Conrad_C]

There is no longer a reliable way to do it in interactive PDF. Video support in interactive PDF depended on Flash, but Flash support was ended at the end of 2020 and so its features have been removed from Adobe applications.

A major problem is PDF player support for video, or the lack of it. Even if you could add video controls to PDF, the only reliable player would be Adobe Acrobat on the desktop. Yet web browsing is now largely mobile. Many of the PDF players in web browsers, desktop applications, and mobile devices do not properly support video playback, and Adobe doesn’t control them. Also, Adobe no longer controls the PDF standard because it’s now an ISO standard.

Video in interactive InDesign publications is now encouraged more through HTML-based solutions such as In5.

[JonathanArias]

Have you tried this?

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/indesign-interactive-pdf-wipes-cropping-of-video...

[BobLevine]

I'm going to jump on my soapbox for a moment. There is no fix. Multimedia is simply something that is not going to work in a PDF unless you have full control over how it's to be viewed.

Otherwise, please describe this project and I am sure we can come up wtih some advice for you.

[scot cameron]

I have a 40 page document that was meant to be an iPDF that had embedded videos and audio files for playback. We want to distribute this to a few hundred people. I set it all up this weekend and then noticed there were noplayback controls. Everything will play but you have to watch it until it ends with no visual feedback and no way to stop or pause it - LOL. Is there a work-around? like just host all my videos on a webserver and embed as iframes somehow? Or just link an image off to a vimeo post perhaps? The audio files at least they stop when you advance from a page

[BobLevine]

In that case, I'd do it as a Publish Online project and be done with it. The last thing I'd consider for this is a PDF and quite frankly I've felt this way for years. This is nothing new. I wrote this six years ago:

It's okay to say no to interactive PDF (boblevine.us)

[scot cameron]

i had read another post about the ePub option and I tried exporting my document. how does one distribute it or host it? do i upload it to my server and just send an URL and ask them to install a reader? Thanks for your help Bob. I wish I'd read about all this before taking it on - i have a lot of explaining to do 🙂

[BobLevine · Accepted solution]

You could use Fixed Layout EPUB but the reader app situation is not exactly great. On Mac or iPad you can use the native Books app. For Windows, Thorium Reader would be the best choice but it still has a few warts.

That said, Publish Online is not an EPUB but it supports almost all of the same features. It's hosted by Adobe and they will supply you with the URL for it. You can embed an iFrame if you want.

Finally, if you want to go a step or two further, you could use in5 which is not free but is worth every dime. 

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