How could MR produce a pdf and then say that it isn’t compatible with Macintosh computers? Who did MR hire to implement their new “Video Enhanced” pdf’s – Bill Gates’ nephew or a seventh grader down the street? Sheesh! Lame.
looks to me like it’s Bill’s fault , the version of windows media player (the plugin that actually plays the videos) for the mac is 9 (released in 2003) , current windows version is 11 . acrobat reader for both is 7 . this assumes (and it may be a bad assumption) that identical version numbers equal identical feature sets
How’s that Bill’s fault? Why is Adobe using proprietary formats in their stuff? Better yet, why is Adobe trying to make Postscript work for thing sit really isn’t suited to? PS is a vector language - that’s why PDFs with photos in them are so honking huge - the language (and it is a language, really - somewhere I have a series of articles from someone, Tom Pittman maybe, on writing Poscript code - cool stuff actually) is NOT suitable for describing bitmapped imaged.
I solved a lot of problems and did away with the bloated pig of a program that is Acrobat Reader and now use the slick and fast and FREEWARE Foxit Reader. Foxit is a single executable - no install program or anything, all of 4MB in size, it loads INSTANTLY, none of that goofy ‘preflight check’ junk that Acrobat Reader does. And there’s a very nice FREEWARE program that installs as a print driver to create PDFs from any program that can print. Found it the other day because a client neeeded it, haven’t loaded it on my system yet, but can’t beat open source free stuff.
–Randy
No, it was yours truly (I am a senior web developer for Mentor Graphics in my day job).
We started out on this project using Macromedia’s Flash 8 and Adobe’s Acrobat 7, but even though Adobe recently bought Macromedia in order to get Flash technology, we found issues with this combination on both Macs and PCs. When I searched Macromedia’s knowledgebase, I finally ran across an issue logged that said simply “Issue with Flash 8 video intermittently not playing in PDF 7” and the resolution was “no known resolution at this time”. Flash 7 files were 3 times larger than flash 8, and flash 8 didn’t work with Acrobat 6 at all.
So we went on to look at Quicktime, Real Player, and Windows Media – all running inside a PDF since that’s what MR wanted as an extension of their Information Station branding.
I found Quicktime files were 3-4 times the size of Flash, and the video was soft – which works great for keeping that “sureal” feel to Hollywood previews, but a lot of detail was lost if trying to use this format for a how-to video where seeing the crisp details was vital.
RealPlayer was crisper, but the files were still 2-3 times the size of Flash 8 and we needed to keep the download size under 14 MB (per MR’s requirement so dailup users would have a prayer of downloading the videos too).
So on to Windows Media and surprise surprise … the video file size was nearly identical to Flash 8, and the video, while a bit softer than Flash 8, was reasonably sharp – good enough for how-to videos in PDFs. But wouldn’t you know it, Uncle Bill’s format won’t play on a Mac worth a darn. [xx(]
So we were on the horns of a dilemma – do we release the video PDFs to the MR customers knowing we would have to tell the Mac peop
I guess it goes without saying that these Video-Enhanced PDFs are not your ordinary garden-variety PDFs. Until I worked with MR on this project, I wasn’t even aware you could embed video inside a PDF.
Pretty cool stuff … but it’s also a bit on the bleeding edge, which is why we couldn’t get the Mac version to work reliably, try as we might.
I’m excited to see the video PDFs I’ve done for MR finally get released … and looking forward to doing more. [swg]
Why not simply strip the .WMV and convert to pure .AVI format?
MACs can cough up and run .AVI’s if need be.
Adobe has been slowly taking over my machine. I may look into that Open Source stuff if it gets too much.
I wished it were that simple. AVI is not a highly compressed format, and the PDF would be at least ten times the already 14 MB size. Would anybody on dial up even consider downloading a 140 MB file?
Then there’s the fact AVI is seen as primarily a Windows format as well. Quicktime, Flash, and RealPlayer are seen as the true cross-platform formats. Unfortunately, only Flash would produce the compressed file sizes we needed and still have acceptable video quality – and Flash doesn’t yet play well with PDFs. Flash + PDF has just enough quirks that we had to fall back to WMV in order to get something that was small, had acceptable quality, and played well inside a PDF document.
My first choice is Flash + PDF and when Adobe finally works out the reliability issue, I’d be happy to standardize on this format in a heartbeat. [swg]
Perhaps a MAC utility that could extract the video from the PDF and convert it to AVI at the user end, rather than doing the conversion on the host and shipping the bloated file? The user would then download the 14 meg PDF and do the extraction at home. An extra step, sure, but at least it would work.
Or, are they really more concerned with keeping the PDF’s encapsulated so nobody can do anything but read them? I suppose Adobe is clever in this regard, but now that I’m starting to get bloated updates (and even a resident program called “apdproxy.exe”) dumped on my computer so that the shopping-oriented websites visited by my wife can shill their wares using the lasted technology.
I’ve seen video extractor tools that will pull video off a DVD, but this video inside a PDF thing is pretty new stuff. You would need a PDF editor program, and all the good ones start at $99 and go up. Plus the notion of editing a PDF with text and still images is pretty basic, but I’ve not seen any PDF editors, save Adobe’s own Acrobat Pro, that will allow you to access embedded video.
Early on we tried some other alternatives like flash video embedded in web pages but it doesn’t really fit the Information Station PDF branding and it results in a gazillion little pieces-parts files in a download. Darn confusing for folks, like what do you click on to “start”?
As far as I know, the PDF format, for better or for worse, is the only near universal document format that allows:
- powerful text editing with kerning, leading, font scaling and precise content positioning
- embedding streaming video
- an easy-to-use single-document delivery unit
Well. I appreciate the insight.
I consider dailup dead. So maybe I am biased in file sizes. Last night I downloaded what amounts to be a 1800 mb file or 1.78 gigabyte in about 2 hours including waiting time for a software demo. The download experience was not unlike the old dailup days where similar amounts of time and patience was require. When dinner was over the file was ready. But that is my two cents with a top shelf internet. One thing I cannot stand was the constant troubles of lost connections, time out etc on dailup.
I too have seen the Ad***** exe on my computer and I will restrict it from running in the future. I already have enough processes running on my machine (55+) and a powerful engine brought to it’s knees by a load of add-ons is not my idea of good computing.
I for one could care less about file sizes. But I do care about paying for an article to download. Im not ready to go there. I do however buy past Kalmbach issues from time to time online at this site.
I still dream that one day the entire MR from the first issue to the latest will be digital and availible to anyone for the asking online sorted by month then by year.
Glad to provide the behind-the-scenes insight to this very interesting MR project. I’m disappointed the Flash + PDF combination isnt’ quite there yet, because the video quality and the small file size is simply outstanding. You can zoom in up to 200% on the page and the video details still look sharp.
It’s great fun to zoom into the PDF page 200%, have the still image start to pixelate, and then when you click on the image to get the video, it suddenly goes sharp – and is a movie to boot! Pretty cool way to present how-to material.
The WMV video doesn’t hold up quite that well at 200%, but it’s workable. I’m eagerly anticipating Adobe and Macromedia getting things worked out one of these days, since they’re now the same company with the recent merger. [swg]
Joe , thanks for the inside info , it’s great to get all the facts
Randy , thanks for the tip on Foxit , wow is it small and fast !
unfortunately it a) doesn’t work on a mac b) doesn’t play the embeded videos
i still think it’s uncle Bill’s fault [:)] since it’s the windows media player plugin that isn’t working
Poke around, someone’s surely made an open-source PDF reader for Macs as well. If you are on some variation of OS-X there whould be plenty, since there are several for all the Linux variations.
Of course it probably won;t play the videos either - but then I’m more of a purist - as I said, Postscript is a vector programming language, not a video playing language. Just as HTML is being way overstretched with more and mor e’extensions’ and overuse of graphics. Worst example - myspace.com, but it’s all over the place. Once again, just liek in every other form of media, the Internet is moving towards way more flash than function (maybe that could be Flash with a capital F too - want me to NEVER visit your web site? Make the intro page in Flash and NOT provide a way to skip it - I will NEVER return). EVERYTHING is goign this way - loook at the new PalmOS. The original was faithful to the mission of the device. It didn;t need multitasking and multithreading. It ran for months on a set of batteries. Now it’s a multi0tasking OS and thus needs a faster, more power-hungry CPU, the battery life is now measured in hours, and for what? So I can view my contacts faster? Every new version of a computer app adds more and more features that 99.9% of the people will NEVER need or use. WHy? Just for product differentiation. I REALLY hope the Firefox peopel don;t go this way, the whole reason I am using it is because it is, plain and simple, a browser. I do not need it to check my email, I have other programs for that. The whole reason Netscape became such garbage was they added way too much unecessary junk to it.
Ok, enough soapbox, now back to trains…
–Randy