Flash Player 9 fscommand 'exec' issue – Works in player 8 but not in 9.
I’ve stumbled upon an issue that’s mentioned in other online locations (Actionscript.org, Northcode) and others) but my specific objective, problem, symptoms and resolution were as follows:
Objective – Launch an executable Windows file from within a Flash 9 projector. To test I used Flex to build a button onscreen in a SWF that issued an ‘fscommand(“exec”,”myApp.exe”)’ upon release and after publishing the SWF I used Flash Player 9 to create a projector. The projector worked perfectly.
Problem – At work, using Eclipse/MTASC I made a different Flash 8 SWF, launched it in a Flash 9 debug player, produced a Projector and found that it didn’t work at all.
Resolution – I opened the Flash 8 SWF in Flash Player 8 (instead of the Debug Player 9) and produced another Projector which worked just fine.
Confessions of a freeware junkie: Various XP tools: Microsoft 'Send To' PowerToys
It was Jennifer Haslam-James on the Signs Of Life project at Endemol in 2007 who turned me on to the joys of the ‘Send To’ powertoy. The original version was for WIndows 95, but the link below seems to cater for everything up to XP. There’s a comment on the page that it didn’t work on Vista. I’m sure I’ll find that out when I most need to!
The ONLY function I seem to use is ‘send to clipboard’, but as a multimedia developer with a constant need to:
- tell other people where to find files;
- refer to groups of files on network volumes; and
- update colleagues with new document locations,
… the SendTo powertoy simply rocks. Props to Jen, and props to the guy who made this link…
Confessions of a freeware junkie: Various XP tools: Microsoft PowerToys
Signs Of Life – FLV video compression settings
I was reminded recently that despite some significant research time into FLV video compression and delivery for Signs Of Life, I’d never really summarised my findings.
After some good experiences with Sorenson compression in the old days I was intrigued to find that Macromedia’s current On2 compression now provides visibly better results. I was also used to the assumption that third party tools would always do a better job than Macromedia’s, so I gave a lot of time to the various codecs in Sorenson Spark, and to testing On2′s VP6 encoding.
To my pleasant surprise the best results I got came from the Macromedia FLV Exporter application that comes free with Flash. The only setting that needed tweaking was the ‘keyframes’. By default it’s set to ‘auto’ or ‘blank’, but I got fantastic results by setting it to 300 (a value I discovered was being set by a third party tool during other testing). I couldn’t find any useful rationale for this otherwise quirky number, but the results spoke for themselves.
Anyhoo, the final compression settings for the videos were:
Video – 225 Kbps, Audio – 96Kbps, Framerate – 25fps, Keyframe – every 300.
