The problem I had did not come to light until this client purchased a Mac for her PC-based office, and of course the first web site viewed on it was their corporate web site. Instead of the sound of people laughing, all they heard was static, and it was loud and annoying.

I had placed a .wav sound in SwishMax to play when the site opened.

The static was a result of exporting the SwishMax file using the export option .sw6 (for version 6 of the Flash Player). The fix was described as this:

“Mac by default uses quicktime as the swf player.
Quicktime can only handle swf4 format.”

So, I immediately exported the file as .sw4, uploaded it and tested it on the Mac, and the problem was resolved. I would like to thank Michael Chrysler up at the SwishMax forum for helping me with this! Since it was posted earlier this year, it has been viewed about 400 times.

Sample Code generated by software programs:

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs
/flash/swflash.cab#version=5,0,42,0"
id="flash" width="200" height="200" />
<param name="movie" value="flash.swf" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" />
<embed name="Movie1" src="flash.swf"
quality="high" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" swLiveConnect="true"
width="200" height="200"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed>
</object>


On one of my web design lists, I asked if anyone had found a solution. The first response came from Cranium Creations:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs
/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,79,0"
data="http://www.websitename.com/flash.swf" width="200px" height="200px"/>
<param name="movie" value="http://www.websitename.com/flash.swf" />
<param name="menu" value="false" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" />
<param name="scale" value="100%" />
<a href="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"
title="link to the Macromedia Flash Player download page">Get the latest
Flash Player from Macromedia</a>
</object>


This validates just great. But in IE it places a small graphic box (that looks like what happens when you don’t upload an image but have it in the code) in the upper left corner of the Flash object on the page until the Flash loads. For most sites that I create, that is not a huge problem, but I felt like to get the page to validate, I created a different problem. I have a larger Flash file on one web site that requires a preloader, and all the page would show was the little color graphic until after the preloader had virtually loaded the movie. Since the majority of the viewers on this particular site would be using IE, I felt I needed a better solution.

I plodded on and found a post on A List Apart (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/flashsatay/ — please refer to to that link for the details). This is a great explanation of the various elements of the Flash code generated by the software programs, but I still had a problem with being able to create the Flash necessary by using SwishMax:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
data="c.swf?path=flash.swf" width="200" height="200" />
<param name="movie" value="c.swf?path=flash.swf" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" />
<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
<img src="images/byline.jpg" width="200" height="200" alt="" />
</object>


I could not get SwishMax to create the container movie above, “c.swf”,
correctly, as it would not take the variable passed to it from the path=flash.swf.
I had to use Macromedia Flash to create the container movie (if someone
knows how to get it to work in SwishMax, I would certainly welcome the
comment!).

(Side Note: the wmode parameter above allows a menu to drop down over the
Flash object.)

This does not totally finish the Flash code though, as now there is no way
to detect the Flash Player (or version). The suggestion is to create an
empty Flash object somewhere else on the page and add in the flash detection
code, which can be accomplished quite simply with the code supplied above
by Cranium Creations.

However, if you don’t care about Flash detection, the img src in the code

above will place a static image on the page instead of the Flash.

The above code has been tested on a PC in IE 6, FireFox 1.5, and Opera 7,
and on a Macintosh in IE 5.2 and FireFox.

I think it is interesting at best to see that Drew McClellan’s quest up at
A List Apart was to condense the markup because he didn’t like the bloated
code generated yet Cranium Creations was because he wanted it to validate
in XHTML.

Now if someone could figure out for me how to make the Windows Movie Videos
load in Mozilla without using the embed command, that would really make
me happy!