flash player 6 and cd-rom exe files

[twist118]

I have created a series of Flash presentations for distribution on a CD-rom. We have been using this presentation to mail to clients, and only about 1% of the time found someone who did not have the correct Flash Player. (100% PC client base, no macs) I recently upgraded to Flash MX and am concerned that not very many people have the Flash 6 player installed on their PC.

When publishing from MX, I tried publishing with the Flash 5 player selection, but the .exe still requires Flash 6? Has anyone else had this problem?

I thought about making an HTML page that checks for the player, but many of our clients are in a corporate enviornment where they do not have internet access, or are not allowed to install anything.

Even if they don't have internet access, can you still run an html page off of a cd? If they don't have the player, I can't really send them out to macromedia.com because 75% won't have internet access.

Or even better would be if you could have the flash 6 player on the cd and the exe could run the player off the CD and not need to install or download anything!

If I can't find a better solution, my guess for a solution is to create a html page with the flash player detection kit that macromedia has... put the flash player installers on the cd. I will just need to work out a way for them to get back to the demo after the player has installed.

If anyone has some recommendations of possible solutions, I would appreciate it.

Thanks!

[Northcode]

If you tell Flash to create a projector (EXE) file then you don't need to install the Flash OCX. The stand-alone EXE files that Flash produces contain everything required for playback, you can even load external SWF files from your CD into the running projector.

[twist118]

That's what I always thought, but it doesnt' seem to work. The CD-Rom I created includes 4 exes. All of them were originally created using Flash 5. And work on all of our computers at work. Windows 98, 2000, and XP. Since upgrading to MX, I've updated 2 of the 4 exes. Those 2 exes don't run on a machine without flash 6 player. When you launch them, it just opens a white screen. I guess I should try installing the flash player on the machine I'm using to test and see if it works then. Maybe it's something else?

[Northcode]

An EXE created with Flash 5 can't load or play an SWF file created with Flash MX.

The version information in the header of the Flash MX (version 6) SWF file prevents it because the older EXE would not understand new features in verison 6 SWF files.

However, an EXE created by Flash MX will play Flash MX (6) and Flash 5 (and older) SWF files without any problems.

Make SURE you're using EXE files created with Flash MX. The symptoms you've decribed are KNOWN to happen with Flash 5 EXE files and Flash MX content.

[twist118]

Thanks! That makes perfect sense with how my files are being brought up. It's great news to know that you don't have to have the player with an exe!

[twist118]

I just don't understand. The post about a Flash 5 exe not being able to launch a Flash 6 exe made sense, but it's not working. Here's what I've got going on:

I have an .exe on a cd rom which serves as a menu; there are 3 buttons in this exe which each launch a new .exe. When I first started this project, all 4 exes were created in Flash 5 and worked great... then I got MX and made some changes to one of the exe's and republished it. It works fine on my machine, but some other machines in my office just opened a white window for the exe that was updated... the others still opened fine. As per the previous post, I republished the menu exe in MX and now it won't launch any of the other exes. It doesn't even open a new window? It doesn't work on my machine, or others in my office. I don't know where to start?

Any ideas? THANKS

[Justmade]

Assume your menu exe is called Main.exe and the other 3 exe is called A.exe, B.exe and C.exe.

You made some change in MX for A.exe and afterward it is blank when some other open it.

What you should do to fix the problem is publsih A.exe in Flash MX.

Note that each EXE has it own player and using Flash MX to publsih Main.exe do no good to A.exe as it is still using the player bundled with itself (which is Flash 5, right ?)

Using Flash MX to publish the main.exe put you to a new part of the security sandbox of FlashMX, which allow you to open external program only in fscommand subfolder. That is you have to put the file this way to make them work :
X:\..\Main.exe
X:\..\fscommand\A.exe
X:\..\fscommand\B.exe
X:\..\fscommand\C.exe
Also, your fscommand command do not need to include the path, ie :
fscommand("exec","A.exe"); etc

If you dont need MX feature in the menu exe, you can publish it back to flash 5 also.

[twist118]

Yes you have my scenario correct Justmade. Thanks for your reply! It's still not working as well though.

Main.exe is published in FlashMX which launches A, B, or C.
A.exe is published in FlashMX
B.exe is published in FlashMX
C.exe is published in Flash5

I don't know if it matters, but the links from main.exe are not direct buttons... The button takes them to a framelabel then plays for 5 frames until it gets to a frame with the action listed below: (5 frames play loading B message)

fscommand("exec", "B.exe");

My CD-Rom is now set up so that main.exe is on the root and A, B, and C exe's are in a folder called fscommand.

The files seem to be launching using this action, but it is litterally taking 2 full minutes to open B.exe from the CD(10mb). When everything was published from Flash5, it took about 10 seconds for the same 10mb file to launch.

Does anyone have a solution to make the exe's launch quicker, or would you recommend I change them to SWF's that load in? The downfall is that they won't be able to have two movies open at once to compare A and B or C.

Thanks!

[Justmade]

How if you click directly your B.exe in the CDROM, do it load quick or it take similar time when your run it from your Main.exe ?

If it take similar time, that mean it is B.exe problem but not the fscommand exec problem.

The next test will be if you publish the flash 5 version of the fla in MX without adding any MX functions, is it still take so long to load?

If not, check what new MX function you added, which is most likely the sources of delay. If yes, it will be some MX / Flash 5 imcompetable problem which is harder to find out....

[twist118]

They open instantly when I open A, B, or C.exe directly.

A, B, and C.exe were published for the Flash 5 player. But I had published main.exe for the Flash 6 player. I republished main.exe for the Flash 5 player and everything is working much faster!

I don't have any FlashMX functions in any of my files. But now I'm affraid that if I want to add MX functions I'm going to have problems! Maybe if all of my files were published for Flash 6... instead of mismatching.

Anyhow, I'm working great now. Thank you so much!