Flash Video failure in Internet Explorer

[Stuckster]

Hi all,

We've got a self-hosted flash video on our home page that autoplays on your first view. It works just fine on all browsers except IE 6.x and 7.x.

Here's the page
http://www.connecttherapy.com

In IE the video loads, however it loads and plays at a frame rate of about 1 fps! ...not a great user experience.

I've Googled extensively looking for a solution or even someone with the same problem, but no luck. I spoke to another developer mate who said he's never seen it before. I really don't know where to start with this one.

We've tested on several machines (Mac and PC) across FF2, FF3, Safari, IE6 and IE7 and Chrome. So at this rate I have to rule out a client side issue.

The only thing out of the ordinary is that we've added some action script that sets an LSO to auto play the video on first view only, but as this is working fine in all other browsers and the problem still occurs when manually playing the video, I suspect that this is not the cause of the issue.

Here's our HTML
------------------

<object width="340" height="291" align="middle" id="video-player2" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000">
			<param value="sameDomain" name="allowScriptAccess"/>
			<param value="/wp-content/uploads/video-player2.swf" name="movie"/>
			<param value="high" name="quality"/>
			<param value="transparent" name="wmode"/> 
			<embed width="340" height="291" align="middle" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" name="video-player2" wmode="transparent" quality="high" src="/wp-content/uploads/video-player2.swf"/>
			</object>

Here's our action script
---------------------------

//connectVideo.playPauseButton = connectPlayPause;
//connectVideo.backButton = connectBackButton;

var cookieseconds:Number=1200;
var playpause_status:Number=0;
var playpause_stopped:Number=1;

rewind_btn.onRelease=function()
{
  if(playpause_status==1)
  {
   connectVideo.stop();
   connectVideo.play();
  }
}

PlayPause_btn.pause_btn.onRelease=function()
{
  handle_pause();
}

PlayPause_btn.play_btn.onRelease=function()
{
  handle_play();	
}

function handle_play()
{
  trace("Handling Play") 	
  PlayPause_btn.play_btn._visible=false;
  PlayPause_btn.pause_btn._visible=true;
  playpause_status=1;
  trace(connectVideo.contentPath)
  connectVideo.contentPath="http://www.connecttherapy.com/wp-content/uploads/website_promo_vid.flv";
  connectVideo.play();
  if(playpause_stopped==1)
  {
   user.data.seconds_user = cookieseconds;
  }  
}

function handle_pause()
{
  PlayPause_btn.pause_btn._visible=false;
  PlayPause_btn.play_btn._visible=true;
  playpause_status=0;
  connectVideo.pause();	
}

user = SharedObject.getLocal("sample1234");
if(user.data.seconds_user==0)
{
 handle_play();	
}

//user.data.seconds_user=cookieseconds;
this.onEnterFrame=function()
{
 if(user.data.seconds_user == undefined and playpause_stopped==1)
 {
	user.data.seconds_user = cookieseconds;
	handle_play();
 }
 else
 {
    if(user.data.seconds_user>0)
	{
		user.data.seconds_user--;
	}
 }
 if(connectVideo.stopped)
 {
	playpause_stopped=1; 
 }
 else
 {
	playpause_stopped=0; 
 }
 
 trace("Seconds  :  " + user.data.seconds_user)
 trace("Player Status  :  " + playpause_stopped)
}

Any help would be very appreciated!
Thanks
Stuckster

[Eye for Video]

I don't know exactly what the problem is but I'll offer a few observations.

we've added some action script that sets an LSO to auto play the video on first view only....I suspect that this is not the cause of the issue.

I'm not so sure about that. Directly downloading the video player from
http://www.connecttherapy.com/wp-con...eo-player2.swf
plays fine in IE7. It doesn’t autoplay but there’s no pausing problem. So it should be easy enough to comment out the LSO code and test. If things work well, then you’ve isolated the problem.
The second thing that caught my eye was the stuttering playback in IE, what you describe as playing at 1fps. To me, it looks more like the video is actually pausing, then starting again, not just playing at a slow frame rate. Is it possible that it’s looping through that code and pausing, then playing, then pausing??
I have no idea why it would happen but I’m wondering if it has anything to do with

var cookieseconds:Number=1200;

Is this actual seconds or is it milliseconds? Because it seems that that’s about the play/pause time when viewed in IE. It would be easy enough to change that to 25000 or something and see if it affects playback in any way.
Are you able to get the “trace” statements to come out? And things look correct?
Best wishes on this one,
Eye for Video
www.cidigitalmedia.com

[Stuckster]

Thanks for your observations EyeforVideo.

I think you were spot on the money.

I reverted to the version we had with no action script and it played just fine in IE.

The solution was to set a frame rate for the video in the action script to be the same as the natural frame rate of the video which was 25 fps.

Plays just fine in IE now.

Thanks again.
Stuckter

[Stuckster]

So

var cookieseconds:Number=1200;

is now

var cookieseconds:Number=25*60;

[Eye for Video]

Glad you got it working.
So did you have to drop the LSO all together, or is that working correctly now?
EfV