End of Life Support for Adobe Flash Player. How to play video in PDF

[teamm66160096]

Hi Adobe Acrobat community,

My business use case: Embed videos into PDFs.

Issues: No more Adobe Flash Player Support in 2020.

According to Adobe Blog, Flash & The Future of Interactive Content | Adobe Blog,​Adobe has decided to terminate its support for flash player. Will Adobe Acrobat Professional DC continue to support the embedding of videos? I have verified that Adobe Flash Player has to be installed in order to embed video into a PDF.

Hence, has Adobe decided the alternative replacement for Adobe Flash Player. Can Adobe assure us users of Adobe PDF that videos that we have embedded will continue to play properly in 2020 when Adobe terminate the support of Adobe Flash Player?

Kindly reply me asap. I have called Adobe helpdesk  from Singapore at 800-448-1643 but your staff failed to provide me any answer.

Regards

L.C

[jeromiec83223024]

Flash Player is going away in 2020.  You'll need to remove any dependencies on Flash Player before then.  This is why we've provided years of advanced notice.

In terms of embedding videos in PDF in a way that ensure that they work beyond the availability of Flash Player, the Acrobat team will be in the best position to comment.  It looks like you can embed H.264 video directly to PDF, which means that the content itself wouldn't have Flash dependencies.  It does imply that Acrobat would need to add native H.264 playback to their product, if they're using Flash Player to play that video content today.  I'm not familiar with the implementation details of Acrobat, since I work on Flash Player.

You might get a better answer over in the Acrobat forum:

Acrobat

[teamm66160096]

Thank you so much for your prompt reply. I will redirect my questions to Acrobat team. Before doing so, please assist me in the following query related Adobe flash:

My use case for Animate CC/Acrobat:

1) I have created carousel / photo gallery / slider slide show via Animate CC and flash action script to  allow user to browse photos.

2) I export the finished product as .swf and embed the .swf into the PDF

Question:

1) I am wondering whether I can view my carousel in the PDF when there is no more flash player in 2020?Because no flash player means no .swf right?

2) Animate CC generate swf files which require flash player to read this particular file format. So what is the use  case of Animate CC after 2020? Can Animate CC export the carousel in H.264 without compromising the interactivity (as described above) that the original .swf file has?

Thank you very much and hope to hear from you soon.

[jeromiec83223024]

1. Your existing carousel content would not work without Flash Player.  Since Flash Player will be phased out by 2020, it's unlikely that continuing to use a SWF would be a viable solution.
   
   
2. Exporting to H.264 would not be a viable solution if you want interactivity.  Your original question asked about embedding videos, and H.264 is a standard video format.
   
   Animate CC allows output to both Flash and HTML5 Canvas.  The impetus behind renaming Flash Professional to Animate was to highlight the fact that the tool was focused on creating rich content in a more technology agnostic way.  That said, it doesn't mean that all Flash-based content is a one-button conversion to HTML and JavaScript.  It's not, and you're probably looking at a significant rewrite for a pure HTML and JavaScript version.  The Animate CC team is best positioned to advise you on that product.
   
   Adobe Animate CC - Home
   
   Acrobat is in the best position to provide you with guidance on what options might be available for interactive content. There's some documentation on using JavaScript, but I'm not sure how robust that support is.  You're currently doing something clever by overloading what is explicitly a document publishing format to make it act like an interactive webpage.
   
   Since the focus of the folks that monitor this particular forum is specifically Flash Player (i.e. we're experts at Flash Player internals and language-level issues), we're not going to be well-versed in Animate's HTML/JavaScript publishing or in Acrobat's HTML/JavaScript support.  I'm definitely curious about whether or not you are able to successfully migrate, but your use-case is too complex to make good guesses about.  I think you're ultimately going to have to experiment and talk to domain experts in the product forums I've pointed you to.
   
   JavaScript for Acrobat
   
   

[madmax]

It does seem very strange that Adobe have given life-ex to Flash but still depend upon it to run movie clips, within their other products, so I have no doubts they will resolve this issue, but it would be helpful to know what direction they will be going  so I can develop my business accordingly and produce future proof products.

[Robert Mc Dowell]

Btw, more and more projects started to make SWF available in Web Assembly. (search on github)

SWF became a standard there is no way to force people not to use it anymore. Also it's robust and bullet proof format since 20 years now.

It's also worth to mention that there are zillions of archives and websites (maintained or not) with swf embedded since 20 years, and for sure no one will pay or waste any time to adapt them to satisfy any kind of technology switch.It's up to the browsers consortium to serve users interests and not the opposite, or for sure

soon or late new browsers will emerge or reverse engineering will occur. I think make SWF as a standard is a must since it actively participate to the web evolution

btw you can upvote this tracker to ask Adobe to release the source of Flash here

Tracker