[Tex/LaTex] Media9 and Flash-free OS environments

media9movie15

I've been using Movie 15 to create narrated PDF files. Works well in Adobe Acrobat and may soon work on the iPad, too (pdf readers there are promising to handle embedded sound). But Movie 15 is now "deprecated".

The replacement, Media9 seems to depend on a Flash engine (built into desktop Adobe Acrobat readers) to play media including sound. Bad choice, it seems to me since, in addition to IOS which is Flash-free, Flash is disappearing from Linux, desktop browsers and possibly elsewhere.

Is the "deprecation" of Movie 15 going to be a problem for its continued use? Is there an alternative way to embed sound in LaTeX-sourced PDFs?

Best Answer

In the LaTeX world, packages which are deprecated almost always remain available. It's an important concept that any 'stable' code stays around so that existing documents can be compiled. So using movie15 should not be an issue in that sense.

On the specific point about the method for inclusion of multimedia content, my understanding is that Adobe have changed the supported methods in Reader, and so it is a question of keeping up with the 'official' route. Multimedia support is pretty tricky to pull off in PDFs as the tools available vary between viewers and platforms. The beamer package includes some code in the multimedia add-on which does not use Flash to embed anything, and which is not about to be deprecated. (It's also not about to have new features added, but that is different!) The author of both movie15 and media9, Alexander Grahn, has recently provided some useful information to fix a bug in multimedia, so I don't think he is ignoring other users, but is simply focussing on an area he feels he can manage to support.

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[Tex/LaTex] Did anyone succeed in playing embedded movies inside Acrobat in Linux

Update

As of 2013/11/04, package media9 contains media player Flash components VPlayer9.swf and APlayer9.swf. They are compatible with the (somewhat outdated) Flash Player 9 plugin that is bundled with Adobe Reader for Linux 9.4.1 and can be used for producing PDF documents with embedded video (MP4/H.264) and audio (MP3) which target this particular Linux version of Adobe Reader.

Alternatively, any Flash-based media player found on the Web which is Flash-9 compatible and which can be configured via FlashVars could be used. (Though the number of such players should be decreasing with the advent of newer Flash versions.)

NB: Flash and media playback was dropped in more recent Readers. AR-9.4.1 is the last version on Linux which supports Flash.

Adobe Reader 9.4.1 for Linux can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/unix/9.x/9.4.1/.

Example code using cube.mp4 and VPlayer9.swf from the media9 package:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{media9}[2013/11/04]

\begin{document}

\includemedia[
  width=0.6\linewidth,height=0.6\linewidth,
  activate=pageopen,
  transparent,
  addresource=cube.mp4,
  flashvars={
    source=cube.mp4     % same path as in addresource!
   &loop=true           % loop video
   &scaleMode=letterbox % preserve aspect ratio
  }
]{}{VPlayer9.swf}

\end{document}

[Tex/LaTex] Beamer Multimedia package

With multimedia, only videos in the AVI format, encoded using one of the standard codecs available on Windows (MS Video 1, Full Frames (Uncompressed)) will successfully play on Windows. MPEG does definitely not work.

\movie{\includegraphics[width=0.8\textwidth]{chaos1.png}}{chaos1.avi}

I successfully produced an AVI from a BMP sequence using pjBmp2Avi.exe and selecting 'MS Video 1'.

Best Answer

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[Tex/LaTex] Did anyone succeed in playing embedded movies inside Acrobat in Linux

[Tex/LaTex] Beamer Multimedia package

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