Embedded Flash content working with Internet Explorer
I do very little with Flash so when it came to embedding a Flash movie into a home page for a site I was working on I was a bit stumped. It seemed to work well in all browsers except Internet Explorer for Windows. Much as I loathe this browser it still remains the most widely used. So I took up the challenge of getting my movie to play.
A little Google searching revealed that the problem was not new and the solutions were well documented. I noticed that there were numerous mentions of the ieupdate.js in various forms. Some put the code snippet directly into the page source and others called it from the head. Some used conditional comments and others didn’t. I tried all of these that I could find but none of them seemed to do the trick. So what was I missing?
Embed vs Param
After more articles about ieupdate.js and how to implement it I came across a paragraph on a forum about the difference between the embed tag and the param tag in the generated source code when you export a Flash .swf movie. It seems that Internet Explorer looks at the param tag to get the path for the movie file and other browsers use the embed tag. My embed tag was very well constructed with the full path to the file but not so for the param tag. I had set the name of the file but not its full path. As soon as I had done that it worked. So:
<param name="movie" value="fullpath/movie.swf">
or like this
<param name="movie"
value="<php $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']; ?>/movie.swf" >
So when the next blue moon comes around and I make a Flash object for a website I’ll bear this in mind.