At the request of some Camtasia Studio Users anxious about the latest round of changes forced on IE as a result of the Eolas patent suit against Microsoft, I’ve created a screencast which illustrates how to use FlashObject to update existing Camtasia Studio 2, Camtasia Studio 3 and Camtasia Theater productions. The screencast is geared towards an audience that has little to moderate Web development experience, so let me know if I missed my mark. :)
Click the image below to view the screencast.
I’m still waiting for approval from the iTunes Music Store, but in the mean time, here’s a podcast feed that you can use to subscribe to this and future screencasts. This is the exact same video, but I’ve done a bunch of zooming and panning enhancements for iPod viewing.
Cogito Ergo Flammeus podcast rss feed
UPDATE 1:
FlashObject has been renamed to SWFObject at the behest of the Adobe legal department. All this really means is that flashobject.js becomes swfobject.js and that the constructor changes from FlashObject to SWFObject.
UPDATE 2:
Some people are having difficulty seeing the hyperlink to download the html shells and other files needed to update Camtasia Studio Flash content, so I’m providing a direct link. The only catch is that I’ve updated the resources to include the latest version of SWFObject (1.4).
Download the Files
4 Comments
Hey man, awesome video!
I noticed that you have some extra stuff in your embed that you might not need, though:
1) the redirect var - set to window.location shouldn’t be needed - my first thought is that it would create an endless loop if the user doesn’t have flash installed, so you might want to take that out
2) the bgcolor is accounted for in the first line (the new FlashObject line), so you don’t need to do the addVariable(”bgcolor”, “”) line either)
3) you don’t have to call the getPlayerVersion() function first - not sure if you were using that for something else, but in that specific example you don’t need it in there for the detection to work.
Thanks for the tips Geoff, I’ll have to take a closer look.
1) I’ve been using the redirect var in conjunction with express install and its been working. In this case its not needed, but what would you propose? I guess I need to look a little closer at the method signature to see what I’m messing up. :)
2) You are totally right about this with regard to bgcolor. In Camtasia Studio 3 we are actually passing in a flashvar color variable that’s used to set the background color of some additional MovieClips, but I overlooked this fact with the Camtasia Studio 2 and Camtasia Theater content.
3) I can’t remember what we were using getPlayerVersion() for…I may have been guilty of using the ol’ copy / past technique a little carelessly.
I’d appreciate your insight as we are planning to use your FlashObject in our next release of the product.
Thanks Geoff, this is excellent information. However, I’m curious where I can find the “empty HTML shells” that you’re using in this demo. Could you post them or email them to me?
cheers,
Peter D
Chico, CA
There’s a hyperlink in the actual screencast that links to the needed files. However, I’ve created a direct link (found under “UPDATE 2″ of the post) to the files and updated everything to the latest version of SWFObject. Hope this helps a bit. :)