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Flash movies embedded in WebHelp project disappear or are black squares

Explorer ,
May 04, 2012 May 04, 2012

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When I embed a couple of small Flash movies (one .flv and one .f4v) into a help topic, the movies play fine when previewed from within RH or when I manually navigate to the SSL > webhelp directory and open the project with a browser. Leaving that environment (either installing our product and its help elsewhere or manually copying the help directory), the movies are either absent or show as black squares. All of the many environments we tested have the latest Flash plug-ins present. I've even verified that the Flash movies in the help directory play if opened manually in a player app.

What could be unique to the development environment that would allow me to manually open the webhelp project with a browser and play the movies with no difficulty yet that same directory, when copied elsewhere, fails to play the movies?

Many thanks!

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Community Expert ,
May 04, 2012 May 04, 2012

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are the movies included as baggage files? just guessing

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Explorer ,
May 04, 2012 May 04, 2012

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The movies are present in the SSL > webhelp directory and are still present when I manually copy the webhelp directory to a new environment and manually open the help in a web browser. I've even checked to ensure that the movies in the output webhelp are still valid by playing them using a standalone app that can play flash movies. They play fine.

They're present in both places yet will only play when the exact same webhelp directory is located in the robohelp development environment.

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Community Expert ,
May 04, 2012 May 04, 2012

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Something to do with the browser you're using? or the location it's been moved to? I don't have any experience with WebHelp & flash movies.

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Explorer ,
May 04, 2012 May 04, 2012

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Thank you for your continued help. This is indeed puzzling. I've tried taking the SSL > webhelp directory to four different computers representing three different OSs (win 7 32-bit, win 7 64-bit, MacOS) and trying multiple browsers on each, after ensuring that the browsers have the proper Flash plug-ins and I've even disabled IE's "protected mode."

Can't figure out why the same exact directory, when dragged outside of the robohelp development environment, stops working.

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LEGEND ,
May 04, 2012 May 04, 2012

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Hi Rocky

Can you share one of the movies for us to see on our end and try it in RoboHelp? Or maybe push some of the content to the web and give us an address to view?

Perhaps by seeing first hand we can determine what is happening.

Cheers... Rick

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Advisor ,
May 04, 2012 May 04, 2012

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In addition to what Rick has suggested, it would also be good to know how the FLV/F4V's were created and encoded. Often these environment glitches can be caused by things called "codecs" (encoder/decoder) that work in a developer's environment because that codec happened to be installed on the developer's machine. There are tons of codecs out there and .FLV or F4V extension doesn't really tell us what's underneath the hood. It's kind of like we've all come to know: not all .pngs and .jpgs are created equal 🙂

None of this may be the issue in your case, but it's worth knowing to help us figure this out.

Thanks

John Daigle

Adobe Certified RoboHelp and Captivate Instructor

Evergreen, Colorado

www.showmethedemo.com

John Daigle
Adobe Certified RoboHelp and Captivate Instructor
Newport, Oregon

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Explorer ,
May 04, 2012 May 04, 2012

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Not sure that I can post content. Perhaps the movies themselves somewhere...

These are test movies that I created using two different means: one comes from camtasia and is saved as a .flv file and the other two started their lives as "Juiceback" stock video backgrounds that are just a few seconds each, one converted to flv and the other to f4v, both converted using Adobe Media Encoder.

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Advisor ,
May 04, 2012 May 04, 2012

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Hmm. I'm always suspicious of Camtasia as I've had uneven results because they seem to apply proprietary stuff to their encoding. However, if you used Adobe Media Encoder, it would seem that would suggest the encoding is OK?

Can you post to www.yousendit.com or www.dropbox.com etc.? It's free. And email Rick and I a link. You'll find our emails in our profiles.

john

John Daigle
Adobe Certified RoboHelp and Captivate Instructor
Newport, Oregon

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LEGEND ,
May 04, 2012 May 04, 2012

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Hi Rocky

I just tested by creating output from Camtasia. I created two different outputs. One in FLV format and one in F4V format. I imported the resulting HTML page into RoboHelp as a topic. I noticed that after I did that, even preview failed to work. What I had to do to make preview work was to add additional files that Camtasia created to my Baggage Files folder in RoboHelp. There were several files involved. Once I did that, the preview worked fine. So did the files once I generated WebHelp.

Now if you are simply adding a topic, then clicking Insert > Multimedia and pointing at an FLV or F4V file, I'm not 100% sure that will work in the end. John probably knows more about this aspect, but I think you may need a "player" in order to present those files from an HMTL page.

Cheers... Rick

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Explorer ,
May 05, 2012 May 05, 2012

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This is great information. I wonder would the same hold true for standalone Flash movie that came from another source? Recall that two of my three test movies did not come from Camtasia, they were just converted to Flash and dropped in.

If this is true, it's puzzing and more than a little frustrating that choosing Insert > Multimedia and placing a supported file doesn't actually place the file in the topic in such a way that it can play.

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LEGEND ,
May 05, 2012 May 05, 2012

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Hello again

I think it all boils down to how the movie was created. If it was created in a manner that requires dependent files in order to play, RoboHelp is unable to sort that and has no clue that internally it may be looking for other files.

If you are able to provide access to one of these other files, I'd be happy to see if I can sort what is happening.

Cheers... Rick

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Explorer ,
May 05, 2012 May 05, 2012

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Thanks, Gang!

I've just emailed the two non-Captivate movies to John. (They're small enough to email.) I'm not seeing Rick's email in his profile so I emailed it only to John with a request to send it on to Rick.

Thanks again.

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Advisor ,
May 06, 2012 May 06, 2012

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OK Rocky. Progress.

Test Project: I created a project with four topics with various video files, (including the two you sent me). I also created a Camtasia video and exported to MP4/SWF playbar wrapper and then converted the MP4 to F4V in Adobe Media Encoder (as I believe you had.)

There may actually be several issues, the most important being the correct MIME Type configured on the web server:

Viewing Locally:

For me, all four topics play nicely if viewed in IE 9, but NOT in Firefox if viewed locally!

I think the Firefox issue is that IE uses an ActiveX Flash Player and Firefox may use a different plug in. I found a page to deal with this, but I don't want to mess up my system to test just now.

The Firefox plugin issue is covered here:

http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Managing%20the%20Flash%20plugin#w_flash-works-in-internet-explor...

Viewing from a web server (which has the proper MIME Types for Flash Video configured):

All four topics play nicely in ALL web browsers (Firefox, IE 9 and Chrome)

http://www.showmethedemo.com/FLV-CamtasiaTests

So the bottom line is to ask your web admins to configure the web server for Flash Video MIME Types.

It's easy for them to do and a Google search with provide tons of helpful "how to" sites depending on the particular web server OS (Windows IIS vs. Linux Apache, etc.)

Hope this helps.

John Daigle

Adobe Certified RoboHelp and Captivate Instructor

Evergreen, Colorado

www.showmethedemo.com

John Daigle
Adobe Certified RoboHelp and Captivate Instructor
Newport, Oregon

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Explorer ,
May 06, 2012 May 06, 2012

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John,

Thank you for all your effort on this. I appreciate everyone's assistance.

I'm a bit confused about server mime types being an issue, as this is not a hosted project. This is a locally resident project, output as webhelp, not webhelppro. While our help is hosted online using RoboHelp Server, this is the backup project that our F1 automatically opens in the event that the user's internet connection is unavailable.

Merely dragging this directly from the RoboHelp development system to any other system and trying to open the help locally, using any browser, fails. Could this still be a mime type issue?

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LEGEND ,
May 06, 2012 May 06, 2012

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Hi all

John sent me the files and I believe I've isolated what is going on. Although it makes no logical sense to me.

I know from working with Captivate files that when you have hyperlinks in your Captivate flash presentation, you will sometimes see the Flash player bark at you and present a dialog saying it has "blocked a potentially unsafe operation". This happens because you are running the content off the local file system and that's a very dangerous place to allow applications to have access to.

I know that in order to coax content to show and for things to begin properly functioning, you have to open the Flash Player Security Settings dialog and add the folder location to the list of trusted locations. I've described how to do this at this link:

Click here to view

So here's where it gets weird. To my knowledge, video content such as FLV and F4V don't interact with the local file system. They are a "view only" format as far as I know. But on a hunch, I tried adding the WebHelp folder to the list of trusted locations. Wallabydarned! It seemed to make things work when I viewed in Firefox locally.

Hopefully this helps... Rick

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Explorer ,
May 07, 2012 May 07, 2012

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I think between the two of you, you've solved it. The problem seemed to be a combination of including the local directory as a trusted site and ensuring that the HTML helper files were generated by Camtasia and included in the RoboHelp project.

I'm testing now but early signs indicate that this is it.

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