Strange controls showing up on random flv playing in window

That's the toolbar for a 3D annotation.

For some reason (and no, I don't know why!) your rich media annot is being interpreted as type=3D instead of type=video, and that wakes up the toolbar.

Is it specific to one computer, or to particular PDFs? If the former it's likely to be a corrupted install, if the latter we could do with seeing a sample - you have my email address.

it seems to be on multiple computers and only on a a few of the 26 videos we have in our pdf. I have not been able to determine if it is always the same videos or if it is random.

Our project is 1.5 gigs so it is not easily e-mailable.

Is there a document preference that would disable that?

Thank you for your help!!

t

Can you extract one page that includes one of the offending annotations, and if so does it stay broken?

Potentially the content sidebar will show if an annot is 3D or RichMedia, but I'm guessing that if this is a corruption, what the sidebar says is equally dubious. The problem is that with a file of your size, going through the actual Postscript code will be a nightmare, hence the save-one-page question.

the issue is so random. I cant find a page that will do it twice in a row. It is really weird. The annotations all say RichMedia.

What would it take to go through the postscript data? Is it even possible? The doc is 46 pages and contains nearly 8 hours of video (26 movies).

Do I need to live with it? we are getting 10,000 copies burned to DVD in a week.

thanks for bearing with me.

mm

With a document that large it may be RAM problems. Although in theory a PDF can be as big as you want, and the renderer swaps the file into memory bit by bit, in practice strange things can start to happen when there's a lot of rich media involved. If the PDF itself was corrupted I'd expect to see the toolbar appearing reliably, which it's not.

One thing to try, temporarily, is to split your PDF into chunks (2 or 4) using the page extract/delete tools and see if the smaller-sized files still behave as bad. If not, then that's the simple fix (albeit not ideal).

Yes it's possible to read the PS code by hand, though the problem is opening a file that big in a text editor and finding the bits in question. There's a specific flag in the /RichMediaSettings dictionary attached to each annotation, which should say "/Toolbar false" - if you change it to true, you get the 3D toolbar even on a video or SWF annotation, but as I said it would then be there every time. I'm sure in this case it's correct in the code, but Acrobat is getting confused. Does it happen in Reader 9, or is it an Acrobat-only issue?

Given the timescale for your project I don't think there's a lot we can do, unless the split-into-bits method works. If I raise it with the engineers they'll want to get their hands on the file, plus they're a little distracted at the moment, so if it's a true bug in A9 there won't be a quick fix. Sorry we can't be of more help.

Thank you. You have been more than helpful. I truly appreciate all your time.

I have one more question. We had a test run and an issue came up with mac 'preview'.We obviously don't want another pdf view being used to view this product. We are using a bounce page with the following script for versions older than 9.0. Is it possible to add a script that it must be Adobe Reader and not another pdf reader? and would that code go on the bounce page before/after the version code?

if (app.viewerVersion>8.99) this.pageNum=0;Thanks again,

m

You can look at app.viewerType, which for Adobe products will say "Reader", "Exchange" or "Exchange-Pro" (exchange was Acrobat before we called it Acrobat).

Foxit Reader also calls itself "Reader", but currently will report version=8 so is caught. However as the string doesn't specifically mention "Adobe", eventually some other vendor will issue software that uses a combination of version and type that makes the test fall over.

SO..

As in your case you're not really interested in if the software is Adobe or not, but if it can run A9 embedded videos, you can change your test to ask "hey dude, do you have a function to find a rich media annotation on a page?"

[b]if (typeof(getAnnotsRichMedia)!=undefined) this.pageNum=0;[/b]

It's safe to assume if it does, it will also be able to play the things even if it's not written by Adobe. You can use the same idea to sniff for other extensions such as 3D.