flix video loads on pc but not mac

[jstrobel]

Hi,

This is my first try at Flix, I love it, it's quite easy to use. However, I can't seem to get my flix movies (mx video in Flash 6) to load on the Mac when they load fine on the PC.

The structure is:

Base movie _level0....this movie loads the section movie like "About Us" into _level0.content.

Section movie.... this movie loads the "video loader" for this section into _level5.

Video loader...this movie loads the actual flix video that was exported from flix into the video loader in _level5.vidholder.


This does seem like a lot of loadmovies. At 30 fps. Is the Mac player not able to handle multiple loadmovies? It doesn't even load after a LONG wait...

Note that it only fails in Safari and IE (didn't try netscape), so it fails online, but plays fine if I open the SWFs locally.

Please advise, I'm very stuck!

Thank you,
Jessica

[jstrobel]

I've been playing with this. Previously my flix videos were between 200k and 400k. That was a bit big. I read all the threads on here saying it could be memory allocation problems with the Mac Player that is causing the videos not to load. Granted, my website is a little player intense. So I squished my videos down to 60 - 120k each. I tested on two G4s and one G5, and they play now!!

But I want to be sure that they will play on other Macs. Will a Mac user please try out this link:
http://win3.lucidiastudios.com

...and please tell me if you see video of a talking guy come up (there's one on almost every page of the site, you won't have to click to see it). If you do test it, can you please tell me your basic hardware specs and browser? I very much appreciate it!!

I suppose this should be moved to siteCheck now?? Sorry, I hope it won't get lost in this forum. I didn't think I'd solve the problem myself!

Jessica

[Jonathan_B]

Hi.
It sounds like a multi-threading issue on the Mac.
If you have multiple flash movies on a web site, the mac can have problems handling it, even under OSX.
jb

[jstrobel]

Thanks Jonathan

What is multi-threading exactly? I looked it up on this forum, didn't see it except in speaking of forums. Is there a way around it? Since Flix is exported as .swf, I thought it would be fine to load more than one .swf video. Only one video will play at a time in each section.

Thanks for the reply,
Jessica

[jstrobel]

Well I was wrong, it only works on the Macs in my office, not on everyone's Macs.

The way it's set up is, I have an animation of the video screen (basically the frame around the video) that is supposed to play before the video starts playing. The animation can't play until the video is loaded, because it would just be an empty frame sitting there for the time it takes to load the video otherwise. So the timeline is stopped, waiting for the video to preload. I tried to load the video into the frame using loadMovie onClipEvent(load) and check (on enterframe) if it's fully loaded by targeting the clip it's loading into. When it was loaded, it would tell the timeline to play the animation, and at the end of the animation, a frame action would target the video to play. This whole scenerio is what doesn't work on the macs.

So in frustration, and fire-breathing bosses, I axed all the animation. As a test. So now, the video loadmovie call is on the first frame of the "frame" swf it's loading into. And the frame is sitting there on first frame along with the empty clip the video is targeted to load into. Rather than exporting it with a stop, I exported with the preloader (fixed 100%) and auto-play. Turns out, this did work on one of the macs it didn't work on with the old setup (animation) and it works on the ones in my office.

The difference is, I gave up all control of trying to preload the video myself, and start the video when I desired. Now it preloads itself and starts as soon as it's loaded. Even though this works (THANKFULLY!), this is not what I want to do. I'd like to have the control to keep the animation.

Not sure what to do...if any Wildform support crew sees this message, please help. I suppose I can call the support number (since I just bought Flix), but I know the boards are your preferred means of support...

Thanks very much in advance. I'm not too sure what's going on...(and my project's a week overdue. )
Jessica