Cannot embed MOV file in Acrobat

Question

I hope this is the right forum for my question - it's the closest one I could find...
My problem is that I get an error message when I try to embad a MOV file into a PDF using Acrobat 9. This has worked in the past. Now suddenly I'm being told the annotation cannot take place either because it can't find the file (but surely it can find it: it was among the items present to me to choose from), or because "the URL is unreachable (make sure the proxy server settings are correct)".
I should mention that these 'MOV' files are actually JPGs that I want to open in a floating window, and that I simply renamed from JPG to MOV so Acrobat's MOV-playing code would kick in. This is a technique I have used successfully in the past - unless the past ones were GIFs (I forgot which) - and furthermore, one can simply double-click these 'MOV' files in Windows Explorer and Quicktime opens them with no problem.
(As to the hypothesis that previous successes were with were with GIFs instead of JPGs. But I just tried that, and Acrobat perceived right away that the MIME types were different and didn't even initialize the authoring system. With JPGs re-named to MOVs, it gets past there, and only complains when you specify the parms (e.g. No Poster, etc.) and it tries to load it. With these renamed GIFs just as with the renamed JPGs, if you simply double-click the 'MOV' in Windows Explorer, Qucktime opens it with no problem.)
As to the 'proxy' issue, I do have a proxy set in my browser (Foxfire), but I have disabled it by chosing 'No proxy' in Options. Just to be sure, I re-booted, brought up Foxfire, and confirmed that it was still set to 'No proxy'. But I still get the error. What could it be?
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
- Peyton

Answer 1

My earlier JPG > MOV solution still works beautifully, even in the latest versions of Acrobat Reader, but – as I have now sadly discovered – it leads to errors in the production of new examples with the current version of Acrobat, and even to a space-wasting and visually ugly result with the latest versions of Vegas Video, which is the app I used earlier to convert my JPGs to MOV in the first place. But thank you for your SWF solution, since that will at least enable me to open the graphic images in current versions of Acro Reader, despite the fact I will now have to include within the SWF itself a message saying ‘to close this window, click in the upper right hand corner of its border’ or some other tacky solution, such as a separate button within the page, departing from the style of all the other RMAs in the PDFs I’ve already prepared. Also, if I want to avoid the (minor, but ugly) letterboxing that occurs when the SWF windows are re-sized or moved, I’ll have to open them via the new interface with its compulsory icon, since that letterboxing occurs only when the SWFs were embedded in legacy mode.
(The fact that the letterboxing occurs only when the SWFs were embedded in legacy mode tells me that that little bug probably belongs to Adobe, not to the app creating the SWFs. Another bug that must belong to Adobe for the same reason is the fact that the Get From Media button does not work when the SWFs were added in legacy mode, but does work if one embeds through the new interface. Yet a THIRD problem – or at a least poor design given how I want things to work – is that the SWF windows can be dragged out of the confines of the Acrobat window if added in legacy mode, although not if added via the new interface. It seems likely that different sets of Adobe programmers were working on the new vs. legacy interfaces. I’m sorry to have to say these things since you seem to want to defend Adobe, but these are the facts as I see them.)
Thanks also for the heads-up you provided as to what I’ll have to contend with in the future. In view of the huge workload I already have on this project, however, instead of trying switch to an entirely different platform, I’m wondering if my best strategy might not be to just continue on my present course using Acrobat, and count on Adobe to resolve these issues in future versions. (Yes, I realize that could be a risky bet.) Let me ask, though, whether Flash or some other product (Flex? AIR?) would meet my needs anyway. Its essential that whatever product I choose have the ability for users to view videos frame by frame, and not slap the play-stop-pause-etc buttons over my sub-titles.
Also, while I’ve written only one app in Flash (a little cartoon clock that worked) - and that was 20 years ago - my impression is that it’s mainly for video. Two properties of my current project seem to make a product like Acrobat much more appropriate: (a) It’s basically TEXT – what I’m working on are research papers and an e-book in linguistics, in which the audio and video clips are examples to prove or illustrate points being argued for in paragraphs of connected prose, to be understood in relation to the full document, as in any article or book; and (b) there are often several of the media clips relating to a particular example grouped closely together: putting them all in the page would make for a much longer result that’s harder for a reader to follow when the clips span possibly several pages for each example. And there will be many, many examples. You can get a sense of what the project is about by having a look at www.vincentasl.info. But that website belongs to an early phase of the project, before it became necessary to add subtitles to all the sign language videos, and include lots more media clips for each example, in addition to graphs showing the rising and falling pitch for some of the audio examples (the situation with the SWF files we have been discussing).  If you’d like to see a sample of the latter, I’d be happy to send one to your e-mail address, as I don’t see a way to attach PDFs to posts in this forum.
Peyton