SWF Won't load if not visible (IE)

[theonyxguy]

We've been using this Flash music player on our site that's been working fine. We moved it further down the page the other day and noticed that in IE wouldn't load it. We placed it back at the top, resized the browser window to make it short enough that the player won't display when you first visit the page and of course same thing. But when the browser is open enough to display it it loads properly. Can anyone shed some light as to what's happening and what we're missing? Any help would be appreciated.

You can view it at www.connectid.net and the swf is on the left side "Featured Music".

Thank you,

TOG

[theonyxguy]

If this has been discussed before, could someone tell me what to search for. I've been unsuccessful with the terms I've used in Google.

Thanks,

TOG

[Paul Ferrie]

Strange it works fine for me in both IE and FF

[atomic]

Although you haven't taken care of the IE EOLAS (click to activate...) problem, also seems to load fine for me on FF and IE.

[theonyxguy]

I just realized I could fix the IE EOLAS from a tutorial I received this week so I'm going to get on that.

But have both of you tried reducing the size of the IE window and then Refreshing the page. The page has to be reduced enough so that you can't see "Featured Music" until you scroll down.

The issue seldom happens right now, but we were thinking of repositioning the player further down the page. This issue stopped us.

Thanks,

TOG

[atomic]

For the EOLAS problem, this is what worked best for me...

http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject/

And yes, the player doesn't load if my browser window is relatively small...

But note that I also get a javascript error warning on the page, whether the browser window is small or not...

[theonyxguy]

Thanks for the tutorial, it fixed issue you mentioned but it didn't fix the one I posted about.

here are 2 links to the file and they still do the same thing.

no java - http://www.connectid.net/playertest.html - (the playlist doesn't come up but I'm not concerned with that here)

java - http://www.connectid.net/playertest2.html

Any other suggestions I could try?

Thanks,

TOG

[atomic]

Well the second link works for me on IE, whether the window is resized and refreshed or not!

[theonyxguy]

I noticed that it works for the first initial load but not when you refresh again.

We found this on the Wimpy site:

Flash player in popup window stops - or - Flash players at the bottom or the page disappear.

In order to conserve system resources, some browsers do not give pages and windows that are in the background (or not visible or "below the fold") any "resources." Only the visible objects are given resources.

NOTE: "Below the fold" means the part of a web page that cannot be seen until the user scrolls down.

Likewise, if a Flash opbject (e.g. Wimpy) is embedded on a portion of the page that is not visible (below the fold), some browsers will prevent the Flash object from initializing until the user scrolls down to make the Flash object visible. Often times, a Flash object will disappear, or not load properly because the user's browser did not give the Flash player any resources to initialize the Flash object when the page was loaded.

There is no way to control the browser in this respect, since the idea of only providing full resources to the visible objects in the front-most window is the way that the developers of the browser intended the browser to work.

We recommend that Wimpy is always visible, or "above the fold" of your web page. Or, you canset your site up to use an HTML frameset to enable the player to always be available/visible.

Or see the following example of how to set up an HTML frameset:
http://www.wimpyplayer.com/frameset/frameset.html

But after studying further I'm wondering if it's the way wimpy is created. Because I have other Flash elements that are "Below the fold" that load no problem. Look at the video players we use - http://www.connectid.net/Multimedia/nfblog/

I'm going to test out frameset later.

[atomic]

Guess you're assuming users keep resizing their browser windows, which I rarely do at all...
How about forcing a full browser window within the .html, so that the player is most likely always visible? Unless you want to position it way down the page...

[theonyxguy]

Actually, we want to reposition it further down the page at times and from time to time (before we realized the problem) in regular usage it has failed to load. We may find ourselves switching players to this one http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_MP3_Player, the same maker of the video player we use. We're going to test it this week.