Matt Bury

Flash Player 9 actually contains 2 virtual engines - so basically it's two plugins in one container. One runs AS 1.0 and AS 2.0 (AVM1) and the other runs AS 3.0 (AVM2). The player automatically detects which version the SWF file is and runs it on the appropriate engine.

Since there's already a vast number of SWFs coded in AS 1.0 and 2.0, Adobe aren't going to stop backward compatibility at any time in the forseeable future, but that's not the point.

To handle even basic things like XML, captioning, buffer-times for MP3 files and the like, developers have to write some very complicated and convoluted code. This has the added drawback of making it error intollerant and therefore unstable. The current Flash MP3 player is an example of this - Flash should be able to handle any MP3, whatever the digital encoding (audio sample rates aside), up to a bit rate of 128 kbps - there are a lot of posts on this forum that say otherwise.

AS 3.0, on the other hand, is not only great for developers, it also brings certain very useful functions within the grasp of non-developers, such as video captioning and accessibility. Since the disabled are the most likely group to benefit the most from eLearning, I think it'd be a good idea to make it easier for developers, designers and course content creators to create an interface that they can use but retains all the advantages that Flash has to offer.

I couldn't agree more! So far, what eLearning mostly offers is on-line tests and assignments and student/teacher social networking.

While these are excellent for particular circumstances, we're still missing out on a lot of the potential for realtime interactive eLearning experiences. There are plenty of others out there offering stuff like Rosetta Stone and Tell Me More (I work in EFL/ESL) and there's no reason why Moodle can't do something similar but also with the added benefits of Moodle's open source, social networking philosophy.

I believe this would make a very powerful combination!

Hi Cathy,

Thanks for the advice.

I've tried your suggestions in various ways but I still keep getting the same result. It's ok in Firefox but distorted in IE7.

I also tried embedding it using Javascript, but that didn't work at all.

Any other ideas?

Hopefully,

Matt

Hey guys,

I'm directly embedding Flash files into Quiz pages and Lesson pages without using the Flash module because I'm using Flash 9 with ActionScript 3.0. The SWFs work fine in both Firefox and IE7 but in IE7 the SWFs always seem to get squashed to about 100 pixels in width.

I've checked the object and embed tags thoroughly and I can't find anything wrong there. Has anyone else had a similar rescaling problem with their SWFs?

Does anyone know why this is happening or how to fix it?

The most common error related to this is that the URL to the MP3 file is probably wrong. When you're working on your desktop, the MP3 file and Flash SWF are usually (but not always) in the same directory so the path is relative (i.e. "audio/mysound.mp3"). When you upload the files to the server, these relative paths can change (i.e. it becomes "") and if the SWF isn't in the same folder, it won't be able to find "audio/mysound.mp3".

I recommend having a dedicated media directory on your server, where you always upload your media files to (i.e. http://mysite.com/moodledata/media/audio/ , http://mysite.com/moodledata/media/pix/ , etc.). That way the paths are standard and it's much easier to find your media files/. You can also protect copyrighted material more easily this way.

So, try using complete URLs to your media files on your server and that'll probably solve the problem.