Patrick McDonald - Latest Comments

Re: Worst Company Name Ever

Longchamp Outlet — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:19:29 -0000

I really enjoyed this.Longchamp Outlet
Karen Millen Outlet
Tiffany & Co Outlet

Re: Flash Preloading Errors? Turn Off gzip.

Ann — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 02:14:27 -0000

On this one server I'm working with, hard-coding the total file size doesn't even make a difference. That temporary fix has always worked for me before.
Here the file thinks it's completed when the preloader has only loaded to about 1/3.

Do you think it's possible to make the flash file work fine with gzip?
Why do all the other files on the page (images, js, etc.) still work fine?

What should I do now, ugh...

Re: Tweening to a Relative Position using a Variable in TweenMax

T_naulet — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 06:25:48 -0000

Excatly what I was looking for; it wokrs perfectly. Thanks!!

Re: Flash Preloading Errors? Turn Off gzip.

SC — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 05:24:07 -0000

So thanks !!!
Since nearly 2 years I "search" for this trouble !
Games

Re: Flash Preloading Errors? Turn Off gzip.

Louai Munajim — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 05:34:15 -0000

Thanks for sharing Charles. A real find, saved me when I had to update the DNS entries on my Mac (changing the hosts file no longer worked).
Anyways ...
I also had issues with a gzipped environment, had to write an additional fall back preloader that had an indeterminate state. Just displays bytes loaded. That way it never fails. You can see it running here in the two states.
flash preloader

Re: Dropbox is About to Have a Price Cut

OR not — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 15:59:53 -0000

Or not apparently, dropbox is currently $200/100GB/yr
Not really much cheaper, especially given the logic of your post and comparing to google docs

Re: Flash Preloading Errors? Turn Off gzip.

Li — Fri, 27 May 2011 12:40:40 -0000

Woa! That is a hard bug to find. Thanks for the info.

Re: Flash Preloading Errors? Turn Off gzip.

Ken — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 00:36:07 -0000

Found this article just after I solved the problem...
Good that you shared this information. It's weird how the gzip it's changes the MIME type.
I did this to my .htaccess
<FilesMatch "(?i)^.*\.(htm|html|shtml|php|txt|xml|js|css)$">
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</FilesMatch>

Re: Flash Preloading Errors? Turn Off gzip.

Kubilay KAYA — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 05:30:59 -0000

I had same problem & solved hard :)
<del datetime="2010-12-05T02:43:17+00:00"> just download this rar
unzip rar file and</del> upload .htaccess file to your public_html folder.

[I took out the download link. The code suggested by Kubilay is below instead]

SetEnv no-gzip dont-vary # Don't compress images/flash SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \ \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png|swf|flv)$ no-gzip dont-vary

Re: Flash Preloading Errors? Turn Off gzip.

Lieven Cardoen — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 11:08:04 -0000

I had a similar issue this week where our Flex application suddenly didn't load in FireFox anymore. All other browsers worked fine. The problem was also GZIP. We just got a white screen in FireFox. The swf was loaded but no content was displayed. Have written a blog post about it with a reference to your blog post.
http://blog.johlero.eu/2010/09...

Re: Flash Preloading Errors? Turn Off gzip.

PatrickMcDonald — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 10:23:10 -0000

Glad to help and thanks for the code.

Re: Flash Preloading Errors? Turn Off gzip.

goyb — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 04:15:40 -0000

I had the same problem with safari and chrome. This is how my .htacces file look slike:

Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on RewriteRule . - [E=no-gzip:1]

This works. Thanx for this post. Saved me a lot of time!

Re: Flash Preloading Errors? Turn Off gzip.

Asa B — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 13:36:12 -0000

Thanks for saving me countless hours of troubleshooting!

-Asa

Re: Flash Preloading Errors? Turn Off gzip.

PatrickMcDonald — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:41:31 -0000

I would tell your host that they are serving their files incorrectly.

Otherwise, try following Darkoleptik's link from above and see if you can figure it out by adding/editing an .htaccess file.

Re: Flash Preloading Errors? Turn Off gzip.

Roosevelt — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:38:09 -0000

Total n00b here! I have this problem but I am in a hosted enviornment (e.g. i don't have the ability to turn off gzip). How do I fix this problem. Again total n00b here so if you can be detailed and I'd be forever in your debt!

Thanks in advance!

Re: Flash Preloading Errors? Turn Off gzip.

henry — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:59:07 -0000

awesome job figuring out this issue, debugging this on a project of mine was a pain. thanks!

Re: Flash Preloading Errors? Turn Off gzip.

the Personalist — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 11:52:54 -0000

Yep, same here - THANK YOU!
(But IE8 still shows the bytes instead of the % - I'm on it...)

Re: Flash Preloading Errors? Turn Off gzip.

Darkoleptik — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 06:44:15 -0000

You saved me dude !!!
i also found that you can disable server gzip compression using .htaccess file
http://www.flash-db.com/Board/index.php?topic=19252.0

Thanks bro for giving me clues on this issue ^^

Cheers from France !

Re: Flash Preloading Errors? Turn Off gzip.

PatrickMcDonald — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 16:39:36 -0000

Unfortunately, I'm not an Apache expert. I just asked the client to have their server admins fix it.

Try some searches for mod_deflate and mod_gzip. I think the gist of it is that when you configure one of these compression modules, you can add file types to an exclusion list, or you can specifically tell it what types to include in its compression.

The exclusion list will look something like this:

SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \ \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png|swf|flv)$ no-gzip dont-vary

If you can't change it server wide, you can do it in a specific directory with an .htaccess file, but I'm not much more help there either.

Re: Flash Preloading Errors? Turn Off gzip.

flash begginer — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 21:54:09 -0000

hello,

I don't speak English very well, sorry.

I have this problem but not sure how to turn off gzip.

can you help me?

I'm a begginer.

thank you

Re: Flash Preloading Errors? Turn Off gzip.

PatrickMcDonald — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:14:55 -0000

No problem, Josh.

Back in the day when they released the FLV file format, I had to configure IIS to serve these new videos with the video/x-flv MIME type. That's why I used Charles to see what was up. And that showed the wrong MIME type along with the other discrepancy of the gzip in the Response Compression.

It seems like some people turn gzip on for everything thinking it will save bandwidth. But compiled SWF files are already about as compressed as they are going to get (the same goes for some image and video files I think). So you're just wasting processing power/time to compress these files.

Re: Flash Preloading Errors? Turn Off gzip.

Josh Jones — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:10:44 -0000

Thanks! I had a few people get this nagging issue as well. I had noticed it was returning fouled up file sizes, but how the heck you found it was encoding it differently is wonderful...

Re: Flash Preloading Errors? Turn Off gzip.

Tabitha — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:49:59 -0000

Thank you thank you thank you! I was having this exact problem on a client site and finally stumbled upon your blog. I used the program you mentioned (Charles), and sure enough...gzip compression! As soon as that was turned off, everything worked fine. You have saved me.

Re: Flash Preloading Errors? Turn Off gzip.

PatrickMcDonald — Fri, 29 May 2009 11:09:19 -0000

I'm glad I could help, Natan. And thanks for being my first commenter.

I used two SWFs in this project because I used SWFAddress for deep linking in Flash. To achieve this, SWFAddress adds a # to the URL which will mess up your preloading if a user goes directly to a deep link. This is discussed in the SWFAddress forum (search for c.swf). Basically, the # forces SWFs in the page to fully load before displaying and adding a intermediary SWF is the fix.

That said, I don't think the second SWF is necessary. Your main SWF should be able to display its own preloader if it's set up correctly.

Re: Flash Preloading Errors? Turn Off gzip.

Natan — Thu, 28 May 2009 18:35:47 -0000

Hi Thanks very much for this info
I wasted alot of time trying to find out what was the problem with my code
Did you find anyway to bypass this problem without using external swf?

Thanks
Natan