Play video in full screen by default

If you can send me the PDF file that works I should be able to figure out how it was done. I'm guessing they used a legacy multimedia object.

J-

Sure, how shall I send it to you? Is using a legacy multimedia object an option in Acrobat 9? I see that it supports legacy formats.

Embedding legacy media is possible in Acrobat 9, but not in X. However it's very strongly discouraged as playback is disabled by default in Adobe Reader, and there are significant stability and security concerns when using it (that mean users are unlikely to accept the content unless it's from a known, trusted person).

Right now we don't have any way to force full screen mode with Rich Media Annotations (as created in Acrobat X). Because the ISO PDF standard doesn't define any way to specify that setting (you can set a lot of things, like the floating window, toolbar, activation, etc. but NOT the full-screen option), the only way it *could* be done would be to add a new feature to the JavaScript API. Adobe have not done this, and there are actually some sensible reasons:

In the world of PDF, security is paramount. Some features can talk to the Web (a Rich Media Annotation being one of them) and others can talk to the local file system, but not both. If a SWF opened in full-screen mode automatically, it could in theory create a fake user interface and trick people into entering sensitive information, which could then be sent to a remote server. By forcing users to explicitly choose to enter full-screen mode, they understand that what they see is a Flash movie, not their normal desktop.

Just a followup - I figured this out based on your comments guys - I did have to embed the quicktime as a legacy format (Acrobat 6), and in the multimedia properties, under the settings tab, if you click on the rendition and hit edit rendition, under the playback location tab you can specify full screen as the default playback method. The security settings really won't be an issue for me on this particular project, as this is just a PDF we use internally to showcase our work for clients. Thanks for the help.

Does this mean that there is a way using the Acrobat 9 multimedia embedding to allow users to click a button and send a video full screen?

I tried using FScommand in Flash, attached to a button, but that doesn't seem to work in the PDF.

I have been looking at how to do this and can't see how. I also can't see how you can make a floating window hidden until the user clicks on the thumbnail to activate, which means the floating button hides a lot of content in the PDF, and rather seems to make the floating window pointless.

Are there any additional ways to control the new multimedia other than those exposed in the Acrobat interface, do you know? Such as javascript. It seems to be quite limited - there's no way to stop one video playing if the user activates a separate piece of media on the page for example.

Any help or info, much appreciated.

It's pretty easy to stop one video playing when another is started. The exposed method "multimedia_pause()" in the video player will pause a video, you can put this in the click event of the second button. You can also set the "activated" property to false in the first RMA to stop it altogether and shut the floating window.

@Cranberry - no, there isn't any way to set FS mode via buttons or scripts, either from the ActionScript side or JavaScript. It's intentional for the reasons I gave above.

Thanks for the answer, but I don't understand how to implement it. Being a bit dumb - is there any info or guide on the multimedia element controls, ora sample even?

Here's what I'm trying to acheieve:
1) Small video which plays on page enter.
2) Button to click which opens the floating window with a bigger version of the video if the user wants to watch the higher res version. So the floating window would not be visible to start with, only visible if the user clicks on the button. However, when they click on the button, I need to stop the low res version which is on the page playing.

It sounds like this is possible, by having the floating window inactive until clicked, and by using multimedia_pause()?

I take it this is possible using Javascript, but I haven't found a JS Guide for Acrobat 9.

Again, thanks for your help.

@UVSAR, thanks for the clarification. I misunderstood what you'd said: I thought you meant that you couldn't send the video fullscreen so that the user wasn't exposed to potential scams, but that they could still choose to take a video fullscreen as a user action. Thanks for clarifying FS is now not possible.

The user can choose to send a video fullscreen by right-clicking the video while it's playing, and choosing "Full Screen Multimedia" from the context menu. However there is NO way to trigger that automatically, or for Flash to set the ball rolling (for example via Actionscript). Anything other than the context menu choice by the user is blocked.

Cranberry:

My advice for you would be to use two different RMAs. One that plays on the page and one that plays the high-rez version in a floating window. That's the only way you'll get the behavior you want. You can see examples of how to pause the video here... http://livedocs.adobe.com/acrobat_sdk/10/Acrobat10_HTMLHelp/JS_API_AcroJS.88.88.php

J-

Hi Joel

Yup, I've made progress on this and got the video playing on page turn, together with a second playing in a floating window when the button is clicked. All seems quite smooth now.

In the code on the page you linked to:
var rm = this.getAnnotsRichMedia(0)[0];

are the zeros (0) and [0] referring to the RM numbers at all? So I have a page with RM1 and RM4 in (because I'd deleted some while I was playing around). Would I be right in thinking that:

var rm = this.getAnnotsRichMedia(3)[3];

would give me access to RM4?

Does that make sense?

the function is getAnnotsRichMedia(page number)[index]

page number counts from zero, so page 3 is "2".
Index is the number of the RMA on that page in the order they were created, so the third one on page 5 is

getAnnotsRichMedia(4)[2]

Got it - that makes sense. Thanks for that.