Alfresco Share Flash Preview

[benswitzer]

Good day.

Been kicking the tires on the latest beta of 3.0 and have been having an issue with the flash document preview.  I have only ever seen the dark grey box with the spinning patter in the middle.

I've installed the Windows Setup as per the instructions with MySQL.  There no exceptions being through at the default log level.

Do I have to install the other SWF Tools?  Thoughts on how I might get this to work.

Thanks,
Ben

[jeckman]

Which version of pdf2swf do you have installed?

swftools 2008-10-27-2255

Compiled from source out of CVS.

[chr_ypma]

i have exactly the same problem, anybody already came up with a solution?

[gaebriel]

Same problem here. As mentioned by previous posters, the image preview works so I get a thumbnail of the first page in the document library list, but the flash movie only comes across as the spinning arrows on a dark grey background.

I've experienced the same result on CentOS 5.2 x86 and x64 builds - both with the most recent updates. I followed the documentation at http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Installing_Labs_3_on_Linux_with_command_line_interface and switched to a MySQL database server. I downloaded and compiled the latest version of swftools (2008-11-12) http://www.swftools.org/swftools-2008-11-12-0905.tar.gz.

I've tried Firefox 3.0.4 on windows and Linux, with flash 10 on windows and flash 9 on linux. I've also tried IE7 on Windows with Flash 10 and it fails. I'd happily provide any additional details for anyone that thinks they might be able to solve this. TIA.

[benswitzer]

When I started this thread, I thought this was a server side issue.  Turns out it was client side, at least for me.

Running the latest build of Share from the SVN, along with the latest build of SWFTools I can see the Flash preview in IE 7 with Flash 9 or 10.  It doesn't work (other than the spinning wheel) in Firefox.  

I know this isn't all that helpful, but just wanted to let people know what my experiences have been thus far.

[jeckman]

There's definitely a client side part of the issue, but I still think the problem is something server side that some clients manage to handle and others don't.

Without changing anything in my install, but hitting it from a windows machine on my local network, I can see the previews fine in IE 7. (This IE 7 tells me it is running flash player 9,0,45,0 says http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/about)

Same windows machine, Firefox 3, just the spinning beach ball. (With flash player 10,0,12, 36).

Different windows machine (VMWare Fusion running on the mac) with Flash Player 10,0,12,26 - spinning beach ball.

Safari, Cruz, Camino, FF 3, on Mac OS all failed - all running flash player 9,0,124,0).

Maybe the trick is a flash player old enough?

[jeckman]

Upgraded Flash Player on Mac OS X to the latest - still has same problem (spinning beach ball).

Maybe it is an older Flash PLayer 9 that's required?

[gaebriel]

I found a link to install previous versions of Flash at http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html. Installing the version 9 ActiveX control content debugger from http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/9/flashplayer_9_ax_debug.exe got me running version 9.0.151.0 according to http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_15507.

My windows workstation I'm testing with is an XP Pro install with SP3 as a VMware Server 2.0 guest. Firefox 3.0.4 with Flash 9.0.151.0 installed still doesn't work, and since I installed that from an old download I had, it's not giving me any debug information. Running IE6 on this machine pops up these errors now when I try to preview a PDF file.

VerifyError: Error #1107: The ABC data is corrupt, attempt to read out of bounds.
ReferenceError: Error #1065: Variable MainTimeline is not defined.

After taking a snapshot and upgrading to IE7 and installing the debugging flash 9 ActiveX control again and verifying I'm runing version 9.0.151.0. I still get the same errors.

VerifyError: Error #1107: The ABC data is corrupt, attempt to read out of bounds.
ReferenceError: Error #1065: Variable MainTimeline is not defined.

Do these debugging errors help anyone?

[gaebriel]

According to http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-14054 at least one of these errors - #1107 started happening after Flash version 9.0.45. Looking more closely at a couple posts ago, I see the guy who got it working in IE7 was running Flash 9.0.45. Perhaps a different version of the swftools… I'll try to test this when I get a chance and let you all know what I find. In the meantime, anyone that has a good solution, please let me know! Thanks.

[chr_ypma]

I will test different versions of Flash on both Vista(firefox and IE8) and MacOSX (firefox and Safari), post my results later this day.

from http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14266 I downloaded all versions, from v9r115 on it doesn't work anymore. The latest release working as far as I can see now is v9.47.

[jeckman]

I will test different versions of Flash on both Vista(firefox and IE8) and MacOSX (firefox and Safari), post my results later this day.

Thanks - I was not very rigorous in my testing to note the trio of OS version (Windows XP), Browser Version (IE 7) and Flash version (10,x,x,x). It would be good to have verification, though I think we'll find nothing later than 9.0.47 works.

I didn't see a specific issue for this in the Alfresco Enterprise 3.0 Jira - once you gather the data, can you open one?