Centering a Floating Window

The rich media annotation has a set of internal properties that can only be accessed from ActionScript in the SWF. Among these properties are a couple intended for positioning the floating player. Right when the Acro 9 came out I was very excited about the RMA and had big plans for how I was going to use it to extend the AcroForm controls, but after much work I found it to be pretty disappointing all around because of bad behavior and a lack of programmatic control. I checked when Acro 10 came out to see if the issues had been fixed and as far as I could tell there hadn't been any significant changes. It's been a while and there's been an update so things might be much better, but I haven't looked at it.

If you want to do your own testing you'll find lots of really useful info, examples and scripts on Joel Geraci's Blog

You weren't looking hard enough - we've had the RichMediaPosition dict key since Acrobat X launched, just no direct way to implement it without plugins.

See my blog for details and a video tutorial.

Ok, I gave it a try works very nicely. This is a solution for the original poster. It helps to have documentation, and a COS editor;)

But for my interest in the RMA, hard coded values still fall short. I designed a floating window RMA as a popup dialog. There might be several locations on a page or within a document where this popup is used to display information to the user. Ideally, a script inside or outside the player would be able to modify the position of the floating player for the best user experience, including activating the floating player no matter which page the user is on. The RMA should only have to be added in one place, and then used anywhere it is necessary.

Since it's floating, the location of the RMA should be irrelevant. Testing shows that if the floating player is already active, the user can change pages and the player maintains it's position on the screen. So good so far, but if the player is activated when the user is on a different page than the source RMA, the player does not appear unless the user navigates to the page with the RMA.

The old media objects do not behave this way. The floating media player was attached to the Acrobat Application, not the document. The old player can acquired media from anywhere in the document, or even another document. And the old floating media player can be created with a script at runtime without having any annotations on the PDF. It would be nice if the RMA was even a fraction as Rich as the old media objects.

I agree that greater runtime control of the AnnotRichMedia object would be useful, but it's unlikely to happen anytime soon - this kind of stuff is firmly in the area of "write yourself a plugin" as I doubt more than a handful of us have ever used RMAs this way.