Adobe Captivate and Flash Player 10

by on January 9, 2009 with 5 Comments in Captivate

Happy new year everyone!

I recently upgraded my Flash Player to version 10 and it wasn’t until I had to preview a project in Captivate that I discovered something was wrong.

Whenever I hit F4 or F8 the project displayed, but I couldn’t see any of the Flash animations I had added but I could see the text and static images. At first I thought it was a bug in Captivate because this particular project had a lot of added flash animations, flash interactivity and flash components with external XML file support.

If I published the project and viewed the output files then everything worked fine. It wasn’t until I started on another project and added a simple flash animation that I figured out what was wrong. That project wouldn’t preview correctly either so I started trying various things to fix the issue. By chance I used another computer and loaded up the same project. It previewed just fine there and that computer had Flash Player 9 installed.

Therefore if you have upgraded your Flash Player to version 10 then you will not be able to preview projects with interactive content. The published projects work just fine, but it’s a pain in the neck that you have to re-publish the project everytime you made a small change just to see the result.

I found this post on the Adobe Forums, which explains what the problem is:

Hi,
What you’ve noticed is an issue we are tracking in Captivate 3. If your projects contain an FMR or an inserted FLV or animations- these might not show up in your preview; but your final project (when published) will not be affected.Thanks,
Shameer
Adobe Captivate

The reason is that- before previewing we look for the Active-X version on your machine, and if it is between version 6 and 9, we preview for the version found. If an Active-X between 6 and 9 is not found, we default to the SWF-6 format. This format doesn’t support SWF’s which are greater than 7 or FLVs. This explains why the assets don’t show up at preview.
We will be putting up a tech-note on this.

 

 

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  • Lars

    So will Adobe be releaseing a Fix so we can publish in Flash player 10?

  • http://www.captivate4.com admin

    Hi Lars,

    Unfortunately Adobe hasn’t released a fix for this problem yet. The only way to fix it is to downgrade your Flash player to version 9.

    Feel free to make a bug report to Adobe – The more people that do the quicker it will be fixed (hopefully).

    http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform&product=5

  • Kim

    Is this the same problem that is causing users who have flash player 10 to not be able to see captivates (published swf files) when they are added to wiki or html pages? Is there a fix to this yet or a timeframe for it?

  • http://www.chartisinsurance.com Rainy

    This problem is happening to me, and others in my org, when we are simply trying to pulbish ANY Captivate files.

    We are in a quandry… are you saying that unless the entire company rolls back its FLASH versions to Version 9, we will not be able to see Captivate published files, or ..

    Or are you saying that we should be publishing Flash files for Version 10???

    thanks.

  • http://www.captivate4.com admin

    Hi Rainy,

    The problem is only visible to the developer – not to the end user. They will see the published Captivate SWF’s as they should.

    If you have Captivate 3 and try to preview your project when you develop it will check for your Flash Player version before the preview comes. If you have Flash Player 10 installed on your PC Captivate cannot understand the value returned from your Flash Player and thats why your preview doesn’t work.

    Once again – for the end users it’s not an issue. They will see your published Captivate files just as you intended.

    /Michael