Controls Not Showing up for FLV Player (Flash 8 Pro)

programming flash
1

I followed the Flash 8 LiveDocs instructions for creating a media player with the new FLV movie component.

Everything works fine on the “Published” page, with the skin SWF and movie FLV in the same directory as the HTML file that contains the embed.

However, when I copy/paste the same exact OBJECT/EMBED into another page on the internet, specifically a blog post on my website, the controls/skin never show up under the movie file… but the movie plays through just fine. ( I do change the references to the SWF file… see below).

And yes, I have uploaded the skin file…

You can see the correctly working version at this URL:
http://www.fourfivetwofour.com/playground/movies/Untitled-1.html

If it helps at all, when I do the OBJECT/EMBED from my blog post, I change all instances of “Untitled-1.swf” to a direct path, ie “http://www.fourfivetwofour…/Untitled-1.swf”.

Is that perhaps what’s causing the problem? And if so, how do you get around that?

Again, the only problem is the player controls/skin not showing up.

Sorry to act like such a n00b… Web/graphic design is what I do (since 1997), but I’ve delayed learning “mad” Flash skills until recently.

Thanks much,

Four

2

I found the problem.

Just in case anyone on here is as silly as me, or doesn’t understand what’s going on, here’s my solution…

Just like you can set a “base” url for any relative links in an HTML document, you can do that same for relative links within an SWF…

The ‘skin’ file for the video player I was using was loaded via a relative url from the SWF file.

When the SWF file is embeded in an HTML document at, say, www.tommygeorge.com, any relative urls will of course be pre-pended with “tommygeorge.com”. If the SWF file is hosted on www.fourfivetwofour.com, however, the relative url breaks, because it’s looking for the skin file in the same directory as the HTML file it’s embedded in (somewhere on tommygeorge.com).

Thankfully, you can set the base url, enabling you to embed your SWF anywhere.

Here’s an example of the code I use, and if for some reason you’re even newer to flash than I am and you want an explaination - I’ll be glad to give you one.

(notice base=" ")

<embed 
src="http://www.fourfivetwofour.com/playground/movies/Untitled-1.swf" 
base="http://www.fourfivetwofour.com/playground/movies/" 
play="false" 
quality="high" 
bgcolor="#ffffff" 
name="Untitled-1" 
allowscriptaccess="never" 
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" 
pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" 
align="middle" 
height="276" 
width="320">