Dynamic Media

Acrobat 8.1 fixes all of our problems!

The world of rich-media PDF is constantly changing. When I started to write the book, I was still using Acrobat 7 but I did have access to Acrobat 8 because I am a beta developer for Adobe Acrobat. Trying to write a book about software that is not yet released and in flux was challenging - As the book went to press in December, Adobe was still improving/upgrading things in Adobe Acrobat for Flash playback.

I wrote a great deal about how Flash worked well on the Mac and on the PC if you limited your use of flash to version 5 or earlier - which QuickTime will playback. When Apple’s released QuickTime 7.1.3, Flash playback via QuickTime was defaulted to ‘Off” in the QuickTime preference settings because of a security problem with Flash 5 files. To view Flash 5 files you had to manually turn it on. Apple decided not to upgrade Flash playback inside of QuickTime and stayed at version 5.

Acrobat 8.1 and Reader 8.1 for the Mac and Windows allows Flash playback from a Flash Player that is used for web browser Flash playback.

Just upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Reader to experience Flash, QuickTime and Windows media video working perfectly. ( Well almost ) but it’s pretty close.