Some questions on controlling embedded video

Question

I am preparing a brochure with lots of embedded videos. I have found that Acrobat does embedded video very well and reliably. The videos are large in physical size so they are enabled from a small thumbnail and run in a window. The documents I have done in the past have had only one clip on a page and I set the clip to disable when the current page is not visible. Some videos are over one minute so if the reader moves on to another page while the clip is running the clip window disappears.
The brochure requires several video clips per page, so I need to make it easy for the user to dismiss a clip window they are finished with. No matter what window settings I use for the clip the windows close button (top right) is miniscule, and I am concerned reader either won’t notice it or find it hard to use. The “Disable when” options in the Edit Video dialog box are very limited, ideally I want a disable when user clicks anywhere outside the clip window, as this isn’t possible I am looking for an alternative. I have considered the following but it looks like none of these are possible or practical:
Dedicated “Close Video” button- there appears to be no command available to user buttons to do this.
Place all clips on their own dedicated page and when the user clicks the “clip icon” it navigates to the video clip page which as a “return’ button which navigates back. This would only work reliably if the user is forced to use the documents page navigation and prevented from using acrobat’s page navigation. Even if you switch off display of acrobat’s navigation buttons it still responds to keyboard arrows.
Any suggestions?
Also when I embed the clip I draw a small rectangle and use “retrieve poster from media” sometimes it puts a small “Play’ icon on the poster and sometimes it doesn’t, its not clear to me how to control this.
Many thanks
Murray

Answer 1

Unfortunately there's always a delay as a Rich Media annot (de)activates, in part due to Acrobat/Reader being a 32-bit application. Rich Media is stored in the PDF file as compressed data, so every time it opens Acrobat/Reader has to churn through a heap of memory-intensive operations to prepare it for handoff to Flash Player. On deactivation, there's a similar amount of reorganization to clear things up. Not a whole lot you can do about it, sorry. Things should improve in future versions.
In terms of the highlight effect when you click a button, that's probably the default "invert" style which all buttons get. You can chage it to an outline instead (on the Options tab of the button's properties) but you can't make the inversion effect any more distinct. If you want to do something like making the click effect turn the button face pure yellow, then change the button's type to "push", also on the Options tab, and load a yellow bitmap or PDF image as the icon of the "down" state. Getting the icon to scale properly is controlled by the Advanced button on the Options tab - choose "non-proportional" and "always scale" to make it fill the rectangle. Of course you can put icons in the other states too if you want, but they'll hide the video thumbnail.