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How to prevent the white 'flash' on page load?

Flash URL Variables Problem

  • Flash problem: I know it's just me, but...variables don't always seem to be passed in URL query strings. When I cruise around the web, occasionally I run into a site which has a Flash problem which must only affect a small number of us. For example, if I go to tinypic.com and try to view a video embedded in their page, the player will load but the movie won't. (I'm not running proxies and allow all javascript [in this instance, anyway] and have the latest Flash player. I don't have any xss protection running.) I'm on XP and choice of browser doesn't seem to make any difference, they all suffer the same fate. If I muck around and directly call their swf, I can get it to play, albeit blown up to browser size. This doesn't work (random video): http://tinypic.com/player.php?v=2q0pv9u&s=3 But this does: http://v3.tinypic.com/player.swf?file=2q0pv9u This has happened to me on other Flash sites. Every once in awhile someone will post a game on the blue, for example, where the same thing seems to be happening. Judging from a few others posting in thread that they're having a problem, I'm not alone, just in a small minority (otherwise I assume these sites would fix their code). I occasionally develop (simple) Flash pieces and am curious what is likely going on behind the scenes that is causing Flash to not find the passed variable. Are the developers being careless or is it strictly happenstance? What best practices aren't being followed? For what it's worth, the old video player on tinypic worked fine. (I rarely get sent tinypic videos, so they changed it sometime in the past year, perhaps.)

  • Answer:

    I should note I'm not trying to pick on tinypic.com here, it just happens to be the closest example to hand.

maxwelton at Ask.Metafilter.Com Visit the source

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Interesting. I'm an Actionscript developer, and I've never come across this problem. Which is not to say I doubt you. I can only add two things to this discussion: 1) I would ask this question on a http://www.kirupa.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=141. 2) Actionscript 2.0 and 3.0 handle querystring vars differently. 2.0 dumps them in a global namespace (_root or _level0). This is really annoying, because there's all sorts of other stuff in that namespace. So there's not way to, say, loop through JUST the querystring vars. 3.0 dumps thing in an object called LoaderInfo. Specifically, LoaderInfo.parameters. I wish I could offer more than that. I'll definitely follow this thread.

grumblebee

Does it happen across multiple web browsers? If so, that probably narrows it down to either a broken plugin or networking problems (browser can't cope with downloading everything at once). Flash has tightened up on things like cross-domain access, so there'll be some Flash stuff out there broken in the latest player, but TinyPic seems fine for me. The other thing to consider is a bug with the way the Flash is embedded, e.g. if the detection/embedding script isn't compatible with your browser. TinyPic uses SWFObject v1.5, when the latest is v2.

malevolent

It does happen across multiple browsers. My IE7 is essential as it comes from MS with whatever the current updates are, I don't use it and leave it alone. in FF, fooling around with various scripting options, etc. doesn't make a difference. What's puzzling to me is that this should be a server side thing, or am I just not smart on this? In other words, if I can go to the page and the player loads, that means the request, complete with the query string, arrived at the other end. Or am I thinking about this incorrectly? I do visit sites which use similar techniques and they load fine--youtube, etc., etc.

maxwelton

I think I may have discovered what the problem was, as I just "fixed" it: At some point in the past I had denied certain sites' requests to save local flash information. When I went to Adobe's flash configuration page, I blew away all old information for web sites, and lo-and-behold, I can see Flash video on these sites now. I still think this might be a bit of sloppy programming on the sites I was having trouble with--they had no alternative code for people who didn't allow local storage, and no testing to see whether the data they were storing actually got stored. Still, it ultimately ended up being my problem, and not theirs.

maxwelton

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