PTE to publish to flash

[maxim]

Hi

I played with PTE for 30mins and am absolutely in love with it

Really nice piece of work

BUT

yes there is a big BUT,

IT DOES NOT publish to flash..........how am i going to put it on the web?

ask everyone to manuallly down load the exe files?

how about the mac users ? IT is not going to run on their machine, correct?

if PTE goes to flash, then, this is absolutely a killer apps

[Conflow]

Hi

I played with PTE for 30mins and am absolutely in love with it

Really nice piece of work

BUT

yes there is a big BUT,

IT DOES NOT publish to flash..........how am i going to put it on the web?

ask everyone to manuallly down load the exe files?

how about the mac users ? IT is not going to run on their machine, correct?

if PTE goes to flash, then, this is absolutely a killer apps

Hi Maxim,

I have posted the following on the Forum many times and I guess that "Microsoft Win PC" Users

are not all that interested in the available 'cross-compatibility options' between Windows and Macs.

The same can not be said for Mac Users ~ They are definitely interested ~ in PTE/Mac compatibility.

For your information the 2 "Attachments" below will point you towards the current state-of-play.

Brian.Conflow.

[nobeefstu]

Welcome Maxim,

There has been lots of discussion on this topic.

You can begin with this recent post :

Converting PTE to AVI and then to Flash

http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....18&hl=flash

Try a search for others.

[Guest grahamjclarke]

If you ever enable PTE to convert to Flash then I would upgrade from 4.4 immediately!

There are several programs out there that attempt to produce time-line display/teaching flash files but all I have found so far are ones that either convert PowerPoint(Horrible) applications or give "chunky" displays.

Important:

If the excellent PTE engineers attempted this, it would be an absolute winner I'm sure BUT:

It MUST cleverly retain the "click" buttons from the original .pte file. eg if I write an application that requires the user to click on a box to go somewhere else.....this action must be preserved in the flash implementation.

Keep up the good work!

Graham

[Lin Evans]

Hi Graham,

Unfortunately this is not something which Flash supports. When an image is converted to Flash or AVI or MPEG, etc., it becomes essentially a "movie" with no interaction possible with the user. Even DVD movies when you use your remote control to select chapters, etc., are not actually running the conversions at the time but are interactive because they are programmed to respond to the light frequencies from the remote control and in that sense at the time are actually acting as rather poor "computers". Movies themselves whether Flase or AVI or DVD or motion film have no ability to be "interactive" but are "canned" implementations.

Executable code, on the other hand, is entirely different. With executable slide shows you are actually still in an interactive mode with the ability to detect "interrupts" from an attached pointing device or keyboard which provides interrupts. These type interrupts would have to be built into the Flash code itself before any programmer using Flash implementations could build them into their own code. PTE's authors are not Flash programmers and even if they were they wouldn't be able to implement such without permission from Adobe (Macromedia) so it's unlikely you will see such any time in the near future.

Best regards,

Lin

If you ever enable PTE to convert to Flash then I would upgrade from 4.4 immediately!

There are several programs out there that attempt to produce time-line display/teaching flash files but all I have found so far are ones that either convert PowerPoint(Horrible) applications or give "chunky" displays.

Important:

If the excellent PTE engineers attempted this, it would be an absolute winner I'm sure BUT:

It MUST cleverly retain the "click" buttons from the original .pte file. eg if I write an application that requires the user to click on a box to go somewhere else.....this action must be preserved in the flash implementation.

Keep up the good work!

Graham

[Lin Evans]

Hi Graham,

The upgrade to 5.0 is free - only the DVD authoring (Deluxe portion) carries an upgrade fee. There are numerous programs which can convert the AVI files produced by PTE to Flash. If you do a search you will find lots of previous information on Flash implementation.

Best reagards,

Lin

If you ever enable PTE to convert to Flash then I would upgrade from 4.4 immediately!

There are several programs out there that attempt to produce time-line display/teaching flash files but all I have found so far are ones that either convert PowerPoint(Horrible) applications or give "chunky" displays.

Important:

If the excellent PTE engineers attempted this, it would be an absolute winner I'm sure BUT:

It MUST cleverly retain the "click" buttons from the original .pte file. eg if I write an application that requires the user to click on a box to go somewhere else.....this action must be preserved in the flash implementation.

Keep up the good work!

Graham

[Lin Evans]

Hi,

There are numerous ways to convert to Flash - lots of 3rd party tools to convert the AVI files output by PTE to Flash or MPEG 4, etc.

To play over the web you have several options. First one must decide if they wish to degrade the quality for web purposes or simply zip the executable and let the user download and play it at full resolution on their own system. Once you have determined whether or not this method is appropriate then it's possible to use several approaches.

Any AVI file can be played by simply posting that file to your web site then providing a link for the user to click. Obviously, though high quality, an AVI is generally a large file taking time to download. It must completely download to your system before playback begins. One can also convert to Windows WMV and this works well for Windows users. It's also a reasonably large file but does have some preload and pseudo -streaming capabilities. Finally, there are a number of third party utilities to easily convert AVI to either Flash SWF or Flash FLV. If you have music synchronized with your slideshow and the duration is over 2 minutes or if the total number of frames in the slideshow (at 30 fps) exceeds 16,000 then Flash FLV with it's streaming and preload is appropriate.

The least expensive way is probably to use the very inexpensive Flix Standard (about $39) or the even less expensive Riva Lite with the free Riva encoder. Actually, there are dozens of converters available.

Eventually, an internal Flash FLV converter is planned but won't be implemented soon. Realize, of course that converting to Flash FLV or Flash SWF does compromise image display quality by a significant amount.

Best regards,

Lin

Hi

I played with PTE for 30mins and am absolutely in love with it

Really nice piece of work

BUT

yes there is a big BUT,

IT DOES NOT publish to flash..........how am i going to put it on the web?

ask everyone to manuallly down load the exe files?

how about the mac users ? IT is not going to run on their machine, correct?

if PTE goes to flash, then, this is absolutely a killer apps

[Guest grahamjclarke]

Hi Graham,

Unfortunately this is not something which Flash supports. When an image is converted to Flash or AVI or MPEG, etc., it becomes essentially a "movie" with no interaction possible with the user. Even DVD movies when you use your remote control to select chapters, etc., are not actually running the conversions at the time but are interactive because they are programmed to respond to the light frequencies from the remote control and in that sense at the time are actually acting as rather poor "computers". Movies themselves whether Flase or AVI or DVD or motion film have no ability to be "interactive" but are "canned" implementations.

Executable code, on the other hand, is entirely different. With executable slide shows you are actually still in an interactive mode with the ability to detect "interrupts" from an attached pointing device or keyboard which provides interrupts. These type interrupts would have to be built into the Flash code itself before any programmer using Flash implementations could build them into their own code. PTE's authors are not Flash programmers and even if they were they wouldn't be able to implement such without permission from Adobe (Macromedia) so it's unlikely you will see such any time in the near future.

Best regards,

Lin

Hi Lin. Very impressed with your response. I will upgrade to 5.0 today. Yes I agree with your technical discourse that Flash files once they are put into frames are "canned" as it were, and therefore "serialised" with no user intervention with the exception of the pause button! However, my understanding is that entire web sites are written in flash that allow user interaction, including localised printing and form building. If this is correct, then this is what I was thinking of - namely a direct conversion from an exe file to a web based flash format that could interact with the user.

Then all my "teaching" type files could be played on a browser over the net as well as being able to perform cross-platform. Hence our "applications" would be universal and run on Linux/Microsoft etc.

If I've still missed the point, I'm sorry but it's not too important, because as you said, I can at least make a serialised flv implementation of my exe files. This will do for the moment I guess. But if .......

I have enjoyed using this great program. I can go straight from idea to implementation in a creative way without hassle. How about including an icon generator withing the program too.

Thanks a lot,

Graham