- Where Were Going with This
- So, What Kinds of Video We Talkin Bout Here?
- Placing a Movie on a Page
- Changing the Poster Image
- Making Our Own Play and Pause Buttons
- Now You Try It
- A Few Final Notes About PDF Movies
- And We Never Even Knew His Name
So, What Kinds of Video We Talkin’ ‘Bout Here?
Surprisingly, under the hood, Acrobat X supports only one type of video: Flash. You can select any kind of movie file that is H.264-encoded——mov, MP4, etc.—but all placed movies are converted to Flash before landing on the page. Flash is, of course, Adobe’s own invention and increasingly Adobe implements pieces of its desktop software with Flash (using a runtime environment they call AIR).
Converting all video to Flash is a convenience for Adobe; its developers can build just one video player into Acrobat X instead of having to support all the myriad possible video formats. What you and I get out of this is complete incompatibility with iPhones, iPads, and other iOS devices; the sad truth is that Acrobat-embedded videos show up on iOS machines as just blank rectangles. This is a significant annoyance in this Modern Era.