How have they done this?

Just found out how they've done this - it's done in InDesign.

Hi nickyg,

You might consider purchasing Bob Connolly's book "Dynamic Media- Music, Video, Animation, and the Web in Adobe PDF." Bob is the owner of pdfpictures and his book is the best available on multimedia in PDFs.

Hope this helps,

Dimitri
WindJack Solutions
www.pdfscripting.com
www.windjack.com

Thanks Dimitri - think I'll be adding that to my shopping list :)

A word of warning though Nickyg:

Flash is only available for Reader 9+
In a perfect world everyone would have the most recent reader, but most people aren't past Reader 6. As such, there are work arounds if the flash file you want embedded is just an FLV.
Depending on your market audience, videos at this moment are best served as either .wmv or .mov
WMV are a Windows Media Video file, and generally require you to be a windows user to view it in the PDF.
MOV is a Quicktime video, and can be viewed on any operating system that has iTunes/Quicktime installed.

That in mind, the book Dimitri suggested is loaded with case stories of how dynamic media is done right. It'll only be a matter of time when the majority of the world will be up to date enough that what we do now will work for them. Until then, just make sure you check the app.viewerVersion before media is served.

Hi nixopax,

[i]"Flash is only available for Reader 9+"[/i]-


is not entirely correct. It is true that Adobe Reader 9 includes a Flash player baked-in ( so the end user does not need to have Flash player already installed on their system in order to view swf files in PDF). BUT, end users with previous versions of Acrobat and Adobe Reader CAN view swf files inside PDFs if they have a Flash player installed on their system (I believe the last estimate was 98% of computers do).

Hope this helps,

Dimitri
WindJack Solutions
www.pdfscripting.com
www.windjack.com

Thanks guys - this is all good stuff! Being new to adding multimedia to PDF's I'm discovering there's a lot more to it than I first thought - but that's normally the way. Going to do a bit of testing as to what the best deployment will be for our target audience.

Thanks again!
Nicky

I'm trying to determine what reader versions I should produce the multimedia PDF's for. Asking around the office it looks like a few of them are still on Acrobat 7 at home, so that might be the lowest common denominator I need to produce for. I've done some testing on Acrobat 7 but only the one with an embedded mov seemed to work. I tried embedding a swf that had been exported for flash player 7 but that didn't work but I'm not sure why as I thought as long as the user had flash player on there pc then it would work? Any ideas?

Cheers
Nicky

Flash was developed by Macromedia. Adobe made PDFs able to display SWF files since Reader 6. However, Macromedia at the time was a rival company and changed their display algorithms each flash player update. Which is why in Reader 7, you would need flash player 7 or lower. ([url=http://www.adobe.com/go/ec22a145]See Adobe Knowledge Base for an example[/url])

Fast forward to 2005: Adobe Systems purchases Macromedia. As of Reader 9, it natively supports flash. All previous versions only support flash when the user has flash player installed, and is a version lower than when the algorithms were changed to disable display for that particular version of reader. It's important to note that due to websites making use of flash to display video(Youtube, Veoh, etc), the majority of users have the most up to date flash player. In my opinion as well as Bob Connolly's flash is a suitable media form for Reader 9 and up.

Yes, it's possible as Dimitri pointed out to use flash in readers prior to version 9, and as long as the person has a flash player whose version is lower than the acrobat reader, you potentially should be safe to use the swf file.