Works with Captivate 2. Additionally, now supports skin.swf’s. Basically, you can choose a skin that your demo / movie uses, and Captivate 2 will generate a skin.swf. You point your playlist to those instead of your regular SWF’s. The CaptivatePlayer can now read them.
CaptivatePlayer is a SWF that plays multiple Captivate movies in succession. Since it’s best to create a bunch of 30 frame or less Captivate demo’s, you’ll typically end up with a bunch of them after a project. The CaptivatePlayer makes it easier to easily play those on the web. You just input their names into the XML playslist file, and upload with the CaptivatePlayer.swf.
Captivate Player 1.2 – Download
HI Jesse,
Thanks for sending this link. I tried to download the ZIP file but received a server error. I will try again in a while. Maybe the server is down or being rebooted.
Ned
Sorry Ned, doing a lot of DNS changes this week. Refresh the page and try again; I updated the link to pull from my main domain, https://www.jessewarden.com.
Hi Jesse,
Im trying to use this with several files i created with Captivate 2, but im having a weird problem.
When the captivateplayer starts, it loads my .swf files, but they are positioned in the top left of the window, over the cpativateplayer controls and border… however, the volume slider shows through.
Also, my .swf’s play, but i dont hear any audio until i click on the volume slider in captivateplayer.
any idea what i am doing wrong?
thanks,
Bill
For the first problem, that is really really weird. Send me one of the problematic SWF files via email (top right of this page, under ‘About’).
For the latter, make sure that there are no FlashVars in the index.htm. I thought I fixed that bug in 1.2, but apparently it’s still there.
hmm… as a follow up to my initial question… I have found that if i create a file in Captivate 2 at a large size, then resize the project (selecting ‘scale’, not ‘crop’) then output the resized file for use in CaptivatePlayer my problem occurs.
/Bill
I’m wondering if it’s somehow overriding Stage.scaleMode in the Flash Player. I am not privy to the actual code Captivate creates in the SWF files it generates, so this is always conjecture. Decompiling it doesn’t always give the answer either.
Hrm… I might be able to hack it to keep the stage settings constant. Again, send me an problmatic SWF file, and I’ll see what I can do time permitting.
Hello Jesse,
Thank you for your work on this. I have a question. I noticed that in version 1 that text input within slides worked, but it seems to have gone away in version 1.2. Just wondering if you have experirence this as well or if it is something on my end.
Cheers,
TM
Weeeeeirrrd… no, this is the first report of this. Most common are sound issues that are sometimes remedied easily, but text? Ugh… what Flash Player are you running and in what browser?
Jesse,
Thank you for taking the time to read my post. I published the v1.2 Captivate Player.fla as an .exe (windows projector file) from Flash 8 (OSX). The project is meant to be run from a Windows CD-Rom. The SWF files are from Captivate 2.0, text inputs work just fine when playing the SWFs inside a browser or as a stand-alone .exe and when I launch the CaptivatePlayer.exe everything seems to load correctly from the XML.
Several slides into the third movie I have a slide that has text input, when the slide loads, the text field is not active, and I’m unable to click into it to make it active. The weird thing is, when I run version 1 of Captivate Player it works like a champ. So maybe the publishing method is the issue?
Could you publish an exe for 1.2?
Thanks,
TM
It might be the Flash 8 security model… strange. I’ll see if I can update the build. Give me till EOD.
Jesse,
Well I think I have been able to answer my own quesiton. I played around with the publish setting in Flash 8. I had been publishing the Captivate Player FLA file as a Flash 7 EXE file (win projectror). That was the problem. I changed the publish settings to publish as a Flash 8 exe file (win projector) and text input is now working correctly.
I guess there is a difference between the handling of text input between Flash 7 and Flash 8.
Thank you again for your hard work on this and for getting back to me so soon. I really like the features in Captivate Player 1.2. I hope Adobe is paying attention, this should be included with Captivate 2.0.
Cheers,
TM
Hi Jesse–
My co-workers and I have been seeing some strange behavior from CaptivatePlayer. Initially, the first movie loads and begins to play just fine. And sometimes subsequent movies work as well.
But other times, it seems to skip ahead. For example, yesterday I was at this site: http://dev.jessewarden.com/captivate/flashcomponents/main.html. Your first movie played fine, but when I clicked the fourth movie in the Sections dropdown, it loaded the last movie and put green checks next to every movie in between.
When I hit the same site today, I left the Sections dropdown displayed and just let it play. When it reached the end of the first movie, I watched it put green check marks next to every menu item as the Loading message displayed. Then the last movie began to play.
I don’t think it’s a problem with this site/training, as I’ve seen it happen in other places on the web, as well as in my own work. Also, sometimes it works fine!
We’re still using CaptivatePlayer v. 1.1 (as I assume you are on the site above), and would like to move to v. 1.2. But I can’t convince my co-workers to do that until we can figure this out. Have you seen this issue before? (Everyone at our company is on XP SP2, and we’re required to use IE 6.)
We’re on the verge of scrapping CaptivatePlayer altogether, and I would really hate to see that happen. This is my last-ditch effort at trying to resolve the issue. Do you have any ideas for us? Thanks!
Hi Jesse,
I just wanted to say thanks for making the CaptivatePlayer available, it’s just what I need for something I’m working on. This is the first time I’ve used Captivate and I’ve just been getting up to speed on how it works, CaptivatePlayer certainly fills a bit of a gap in the best practice for delivering Captivate content.
I hope it’s not too cheeky to ask a small question, I am trying to add Pause/Play, next,previous buttons inside the CaptivatePlayer FLA and also to have a SWF file load in first that gives a list of all the SWFs in the project, this list would be clickable so that you could jump to any of those movies. I would like this to basically call the same method as used by the menu so that the Tick Icon is marked for each one and the movie loaded in just as if you’d clicked on the CaptivatePlayer menu. I’ve had a look through the CaptivatePlayer.as file and I can see functions that have something to do with it but I’m not sure if there is any hook in there that will allow me to do that.
If you could give me any pointer in the right direction I would be extremely grateful!!!
Thanks again for the CaptivatePlayer!
Hi Jesse,
First of all: Congratulations. You’ve done a good job on Captivateplayer. It’s a great product, and thank you for sharing it with us.
I’m waiting for some changes on it: I need to use Captivateplayer to manage 200 flash presentations but it is almost impossible using only 1 level menu…
How about allowing (in the xml file) to create a multi-menu level? For instance:
Introduction
Overview
Requirements
Chapter 1
Subject 1
Topic A
Topic B
Subject 2
…
Subject N
Chapter 2
…
Chapter N
It would be useful.
Best regards,
Paulo
Ops… I mean:
Introduction
—-Overview
—-Requirements
Chapter 1
—-Subject 1
—Topic A
—Topic B
—-Subject 2
—-…
—-Subject N
Chapter 2
…
Chapter N
Paulo
Jesse
I have had a similar problem to TM (posted on feb 7 2007). I see he found a solution, but I don’t understand it! I’m using a Flash 8 version of CaptivatePlayer and publishing my Captivate .swfs in Flash 8, but I still can’t input text. I’m a novice – does ‘I had been publishing the Captivate Player FLA file as a Flash 7 EXE file (win projectror). That was the problem. I changed the publish settings to publish as a Flash 8 exe file (win projector) and text input is now working correctly.’ involve some step that I’m not doing? Any help would be gratefully received – I love CaptivatePlayer – I just wish I could get this bit to work!
Lynne
how do i change the xml that the captivateplayer reads. i have diffeernt buttons on stage and each will play 3 captivate swfs. i need a different xml file for each button. any help would be great.thanx
Just wanted to say thanks, Jesse. I remember when you were “playing” with this during the beta for Captivate 1, and it’s been great to see you upgrade it with each new version. Captivate Player rocks – and so do you! Thanks again for your hard work and your willingness to share a great tool with the Captivate Community!
Larry Walther
Adobe Certified Instructor (Captivate)
Adobe Community Expert (Captivate)
I’m having a problem when I add a skin to my project. After I build the menu, the audio associated with each file does not “jump to” the slide number I choose. I’m publishing to the Flash 8 player and it works on some and not others.
The audio continues to run no matter which slide I “jump to” visually. Anyone run into this before on Captivate 2?
Hey Sam,
I just ran into the same problem with my Captivate 2 file: the menu jumps the project visually, but the audio from the previous slide continues to play until the end.
Did you ever figure out a workaround?
Hi, I am having the same problem as the last two posters. When I export my Captivate 2.0 file into Flash 8, then publish the movie, the audio continues to play, regardless of what slide I select. If I take it back to the beginning of the .swf file, the audio starts again, playing over the existing audio.
Has anybody found a solution to this?
Great Tool, thanks for sharing. I have a series of captivate lessons that I am merging into one (with the help of your tool). I was wondering if on one of my .swf, I could link to another .swf and still stay inside the captivateplayer app.