Problems with authoring and autorun CD

[D-von]

Hey there

I've looked all over this board, and the internet, and Roxio's site, blah blah blah, and I have found some good information to familiarize myself with making a mac/pc autorun cd with exe's and app's inside, but I am still having problems and I think I need some 1 on 1 help here.

I have a flash movie that is going to be an electonic press kit for a musician. Our goal is to have a CD that you can stick into a mac or a pc and have it run the .exe or .app on its own for the easiest execution possible for the computer illiterate. We haven't done anything like this in the past, so this is all new to us.

I am running Toast 8 on MacOSX, and the tutorials I have found deal with earlier versions and are quite confusing. I keep seeing that I need to make an image folder with all the mac stuff in it and stick that on the CD for the mac. I also see that i need to have an autorun.inf file, an icon file, and the .exe file on the root of the CD for a pc. (I'm not completely sure if this is totally correct as it isn't working to my liking, but this is just what I have been doing because that's what it looks like everything is telling me to do.)

When I stick it into either operating system, the CD root folder comes up automatically, but nothing actually gets executed on its own. This is the autorun file that i have named autorun.inf in the root of the cd

[autorun]
open=cristo.exe
icon=c.ico

The other issue is the fullscreen in flash. I have this in the first frame of the movie

fscommand("fullscreen", "true");
fscommand("allowscale", "false");
fscommand("showmenu", "false");

When I open up just the .swf, it works as it should, whereas, the movie fills up the entire screen, but there is no scaling, so the size of the actual area supposed to be viewed would, theoretically, be the same for all computers. But, when I open up the .app on the mac, or the .exe on the pc, the fullscreen works, but the movie is scaled and stretched to fill as much of the screen as it can. According to my understanding of that actionscript, it should not do that, but I am new to the executable files and am wondering if that has something to do with it.

Thanks to whoever reads this, and double thanks to anyone that could shed some light on the matter.

-devon

[flashpipe1]

With OSX, Mac removed the ability to autorun CDs. The best you can do is open the folder with the cross-platform exe.

The autorun.ini file should work for any PC that has autorun activated.

Other than putting the .ini file on for PCs, there's not much else you can do...

As far as making the hybrid CD, you've described the proper way to set that up in toast (as you can only make a hybrid mac/pc CD on a mac) if you need to share assets to conserve space on the CD.

Hope that helps!

[D-von]

So the autorun code is correct?
You said autorun.INI, I made it autorun.INF. will that screw it up?

Also, any thoughts on the actionscript? The allowscale, false thing is still not working at all. I kinda think it might be something wonky with CS3 because the former macromedia products have been a tad buggy with my computer here, but that's all I can really think of.

[goliard]

I bought SWF Studio to solve a number of similar issues, including control over the screen display. Maybe that's not what you want to hear! I have found them very good when responding to queries, and the program gives you many other possibilities...

[D-von]

Yeah, its more the issue of I am definitely seemingly doing everything right, but is coming out wrong, kind of deal. But if there is no prevail, it'd totally be something worth looking into. Thanks.

[Northcode]

You definitely want to make an autorun.INF file, not an INI extension for Windows. The contents of the autorun file are fine.

On the Mac side the autoplay capability is not really gone, it's just part of QuickTime and it's disabled by default so it's not as useful as it once was.

Putting all the fscommands together in one frame like that WILL cause problems because of a bug in the Flash 9 player. You can read all about it in this post on my blog.

Love the Filler Bunny avatar

[D-von]

Ok, i have no idea why it was bunking up in the first place, but I have the windows version running. I am wondering now about Mac OSX. I know it can't auto run now, but I know that certain programs and CDs that have a background image to the folder that the icon is in, and the icon itself is very large and obvious to click on.

I'd like to make this as simple as possible so that people don't have to search through folders, or mistakenly click on a folder they weren't supposed to, and I thought this would be a good way to do it.

any thoughts?

ps. yeah man fillerbunny rules