Answers from the Flash Guru: Solving Browser Incompatibility Los Angeles CA

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Originally published at Internet.com

Our favorite Flash Video expert, Stefan Richter, is back to answer another question taken directly from our user forum. This time, Richter solves the problem of Flash Video that plays properly on one browser, but not others.

Stefan Richter

Reader "clockworkagency" Asked:
My new video works in Explorer, but in Netscape or Firefox it just blinks and has a blinking FLV placeholder

Any ideas how to fix this?

Stefan Answered:
With Flash Video, the browser itself isn't the problem, only the Flash player installed with that browser. In a situation like this, the solution is typically to update the Flash players in the problem browsers.

When you upgrade a Flash player on a Windows PC, you're only installing it on the particular browser you're using, not system wide. Internet Explorer uses ActiveX controls, while Mozilla-based browsers (Netscape and Firefox) use a plug-in architecture, so they can't share resources.

The first step, then, is to update your browsers. But the blinking FLV also shows that there's something wrong with your code. Users without the proper player software should never see a blinking FLV, but instead a message telling them to upgrade their software.

You need to install Flash player detect code to your page, a snippet of JavaScript that determines the version of the Flash player on the viewer's computer, and prompts them to upgrade, if needed. If you're creating your video file with Adobe's Flash CS3 or Flash 8, you'll see an option to encode with HTML. This will create not only the FLV file, but also the code for your Web page, including the JavaScript detect.

If you're using a different program to create your FLV file, you'll need to add the JavaScript code by hand. Visit this page for the code. It's not hard, so you don't need to know JavaScript to use it.

Other Flash Guru articles:
* Advice from the Flash Guru * The Flash Guru Answers Your Questions