Streaming YouTube Videos in PDF!

[Sean Kelly]

Hey there,

I'm testing a new feature and need a hand please.

I can now put videos, audio and flash in PDF documents using the paid version of PDF Printer (Pdf Printer Pro).

Where I need a hand is if some of you could test out the attached PDF for me please? It streams youtube videos right into your PDF. This PDF is only 86Kb in size and plays a 5 minute music video in pretty good quality with sound.

I'm keen to know what kinds of problems people encounter (if any) when trying to view the PDF on their computers.

Please note that you will have to make sure your firewall is not blocking the pdf reader from accessing youtube and you have Acrobat Reader v8 or higher.

Thanks for the feedback!
Sean

PS: DO NOT buy my product, it's not ready yet. Ok?

[Martin Luxton]

Hi Sean,

Looks very interesting but Youtube is banned here. Got any examples with Vimeo, etc?

Martin

[Aronya]

Worked fine for me. My only complaint would be that annoying spinning wheel that stays in the middle of the screen until the video download is complete. It kept interrupting my view of that blonde!

[Sean Kelly]

Originally Posted by Martin Luxton

Hi Sean,

Looks very interesting but Youtube is banned here. Got any examples with Vimeo, etc?

Martin

Hi Martin, when you say 'banned' do you mean it's banned for your IP or region? It's working ok here.. did you see any specific message?

I'll create a vimeo version as soon as the youtube version is working perfectly. We have the option of using the youtube api so the youtube logo is not displayed and some view stats from youtube can also be displayed in the pdf flv-viewer.

Thanks!
Sean

[Sean Kelly]

Originally Posted by Aronya

Worked fine for me. My only complaint would be that annoying spinning wheel that stays in the middle of the screen until the video download is complete. It kept interrupting my view of that blonde!

Hmmm.. the spinning wheel should only stay there until the initial buffer is filled.. perhaps there is a bug.. I'm looking into it and will fix it.

Thanks!

Sean

[Chuck Evans]

Sean,

Downloaded and tested on my iMac and the only there was a link to your product.

chuck

[Lawrh]

Works fine for me, although the tune is obnoxious. BTW, Adobe Acrobat reader is not required. As I avoid bloatware whenever I can, I use Foxit reader. The stream worked perfectly.

[Marty S]

Dude, I was just working on trying to solve this problem using Acrobat Pro 9 - it doesn't do it, so KUDOS to you for trying.

The download and streaming worked fine on my end.

Now let me ask you - If I create a PDF in AA9 then bring it into PDF printer pro, I can then add a streaming video? By streaming, I also mean from my private video host like WebVideoZone.

I have a small ebook I can use this for right now with embedded video. so let me know when you release it and I can provide you a real-world example.

[Sean Kelly]

Originally Posted by Chuck Evans

Sean,

Downloaded and tested on my iMac and the only there was a link to your product.

chuck

Hi Chuck! I'm trying it on my MacMini right now.. it's running OSX.. I'll be back in a minute or two with my results.. thanks for the feedback!

Sean

[Marty S]

Originally Posted by Chuck Evans

Sean,

Downloaded and tested on my iMac and the only there was a link to your product.

chuck

Yes, me too. Worked fine on my PC but no video link on my iMac.

[Dave OSullivan]

Works perfect here on XP with Adobe 8.1

No buffer issues at all, very smooth.

Dave.

[Sean Kelly]

Hi Chuck, yes I can confirm that in the Mac the Flash does not play inside the PDF. I see the 'videoPlayer.swf' text but when I click on it nothing happens.

I even saved the PDF to the desktop and nada.. same result. Maybe Mac PDF readers don't support Flash yet. I'll add this to my list.

Thanks!
Sean

[Sean Kelly]

Originally Posted by Dave OSullivan

Works perfect here on XP with Adobe 8.1

No buffer issues at all, very smooth.

Dave.

I have the same result here but I have a super high speed internet connection because I get my TV through my phone line as well. It's ADSL v2 I think.

Thanks!
Sean

[Marty S]

Originally Posted by Sean Kelly

Hi Chuck! I'm trying it on my MacMini right now.. it's running OSX.. I'll be back in a minute or two with my results.. thanks for the feedback!

Sean

I thought it might be an issue with "Preview" the iMac default PDF viewer, so I then opened it with Acrobat 9, and it did recognize that there was a video, since I had to click "approve to view the flash", however it got stuck on the buffering, actually never started, so something still not quite right there.

[severt]

Works great here with Adobe Reader 8.1

[Steve Diamond]

Works fine in AR 8.1 on Vista 32-bit. AR pops up a permission dialog that lets me choose to block it, play it once, or add the document to the "trusted" list. The spinning wheel shows for just a few seconds, until the buffer is maybe 5% full. Then it starts playing. But I have a very fast cable connection (about 16 - 20 mbits/sec). For slower connections, the buffering rules may require more of a buffer before playing.

[Sean Kelly]

Originally Posted by Marty S

I thought it might be an issue with "Preview" the iMac default PDF viewer, so I then opened it with Acrobat 9, and it did recognize that there was a video, since I had to click "approve to view the flash", however it got stuck on the buffering, actually never started, so something still not quite right there.

Hi Marty, what you're saying is exactly the same as I've just read on the Adobe forums here: Adobe Forums: Swf in PDF does not play on MAC

There are two ways to embed Flash in PDFs and it seems I'm using the 'legacy' way. I'll change my code and use the new 'rendition' method. Then it should work on the Mac as well.

Man I'm happy we found this.. well done everyone!

Sean

[Sean Kelly]

Originally Posted by Steve Diamond

Works fine in AR 8.1 on Vista 32-bit. AR pops up a permission dialog that lets me choose to block it, play it once, or add the document to the "trusted" list. The spinning wheel shows for just a few seconds, until the buffer is maybe 5% full. Then it starts playing. But I have a very fast cable connection (about 16 - 20 mbits/sec). For slower connections, the buffering rules may require more of a buffer before playing.

Thanks Steve, thats an excellent point about the buffering, I'll add this as well as its important to have as smooth a playback as possible.

Sean

[Martin Luxton]

Hi Sean,

Youtube is banned in Turkey.

Just had a thought. Can you add a proxy to the pdf link?

Might be a selling point as it's not just countries that ban video watching

Martin

[manicman1]

Pretty cool

any idea what the WSO cost will be when you launch?

can I stream video from other location other than youtube?

[Lawrh]

It's interesting that some have buffering issues. I only have a 3 Mbit/sec DSL connection and the stream was flawless. Perhaps it may be network congestion with the ISP.

[Sean Kelly]

Originally Posted by Martin Luxton

Hi Sean,

Youtube is banned in Turkey.

Just had a thought. Can you add a proxy to the pdf link?

Might be a selling point as it's not just countries that ban video watching

Martin

Hi Martin, you can use any Url so if you have a proxy that will passthrough the stream it should work for you.

eg: http://fakeproxysite.com/?url=http:/...om/somev-id-id

Right now I'm focusing on making sure this thing just works. Adobe PDFs are a nightmare under the hood.

Sean

[Sean Kelly]

Originally Posted by manicman1

Pretty cool

any idea what the WSO cost will be when you launch?

can I stream video from other location other than youtube?

This is just a Flash file that I'm coding. The PDF converter can embed Flash right now. You can use your own if you like. The flash player that I'm building & including can use any server url. You get the flash source with the product and can build the flash yourself with your own url and further custom changes.

I have no plans for a WSO as the product price is under $20 already.

This is a cool idea, but it's no good if it does not work, that's why I'm asking for a little help here.

Again, to reiterate, and to make sure this thread is not nuked, please DO NOT buy this product, it is not ready.

Again, thank you all!
Sean

[Sean Kelly]

Originally Posted by Lawrh

It's interesting that some have buffering issues. I only have a 3 Mbit/sec DSL connection and the stream was flawless. Perhaps it may be network congestion with the ISP.

Yes, it might be a YouTube thing, I had a problem only one time today, the stream was a bit slow but every other time it worked just fine like you said.

Sean

[Sean Kelly]

Hi Marty,

As requested via PM attached is an example PDF with your Poker video in it streamed from web video player dot com.

Sean

[Marty S]

Originally Posted by Sean Kelly

Hi Marty,

As requested via PM attached is an example PDF with your Poker video in it streamed from web video player dot com.

Sean

Thank you. Works perfect on the PC, still nothing on the iMac. This is streamed from webvideozone if anyone is interested. (Language warning in video however...oops!) Very exiting! When you get the Mac OSX working, it would be a good time to raise your price, because there is ZERO competition with this feature right now.

[Martin Luxton]

Hi Sean,

Just watched Marty's video (I'm running XP).

Loaded almost immediately (about 2 seconds' buffering).

Picture and sound quality very good.

Thumbs up!

Martin

[Stefan Vee]

Pretty cool!
Works fine.
Windows Vista - Adobe Reader 9

[Heman Patel]

This is preety awesome, worked fine for me. It did take about 20-25 seconds to load but def. works. I've got Adobe reader 9.

[Harry Behrens]

Worked fine for me - first time I've seen anything like that That's definitely going to be catching on soon, I don't doubt.

[Fernando Veloso]

Sean,

Everything fine in this end, WinXP and Acrobat Reader 9.

Is it possible to insert Camtasia videos hosted in my own server? Or that way they stay "public available"?

Fernando

[Josh Anderson]

Slider bar is a little buggy, full screen does not work, Far right about button thingy opens buttons that do not work, and video plays in a loop. Other than that it seems to work quite nicely.

Also for anyone reading this thread who may not be aware you can embed audio and video in PDF documents and remotely host them as well. This is a standard feature of Adobe Acrobat... but the player that pulls in the YT video is a nice twist.

[Gail Sober]

When I saved and opened the file I got this message

You have opened a document that contains Adobe(R) Flash(R) Player multimedia content. You can decide whether to play content now and also set options to do when you open this document in the future.

[] Play the multimedia content this one time
[] Play the multimedia content and add this document to my list of trusted documents

Normally, I would have just closed it at that point unless I really trusted the source. I'm usually overly cautious regarding those kinds of things but I went ahead and did it this time and it played fine.

[Marty S]

Originally Posted by Josh Anderson

Also for anyone reading this thread who may not be aware you can embed audio and video in PDF documents and remotely host them as well. This is a standard feature of Adobe Acrobat... but the player that pulls in the YT video is a nice twist.

Interesting. Josh, can you show an example of this? The forums at Adobe and Apple cannot produce this - believe me - I have asked. The documentation alludes to it in Acrobat, but nobody in that forum has been able to figure it out. I also went through ALL the tutorials at Adobe and Lynda regarding this and neither show that it can be done.

To be clear, I am particularly talking about streaming from another source inside a PDF document, NOT downloading the video with the PDF.

[astaga]

Hey Sean,
They worked fine for me. I'm on Vista Home. Tried both Adobe 9 as well as Foxit Reader. PDF document opened almost immediately, then the video started playing about 6 seconds later. All smooth, no jerky scenes.

[Gary Killops]

Windows Vista and Adobe Reader 8.1 worked fine fo me. Very cool.

Gary

[Josh Anderson]

Originally Posted by Marty S

Interesting. Josh, can you show an example of this? The forums at Adobe and Apple cannot produce this - believe me - I have asked. The documentation alludes to it in Acrobat, but nobody in that forum has been able to figure it out. I also went through ALL the tutorials at Adobe and Lynda regarding this and neither show that it can be done.

To be clear, I am particularly talking about streaming from another source inside a PDF document, NOT downloading the video with the PDF.

In the location just type an absolute url (including http://) when embedding media.

Here is a tutorial I put out 3 years ago showing how to put media in PDF. Its using Adobe Acrobat 6 pro but the concepts are essentially the same:

How to Add Video and Audio to a PDF document

[sitywyde]

Sorry, but nothing happened for me, just a blank screen

[Keith Choy]

hi Sean,

Worked fine in my test here on Win XP, Acrobat Reader 9.1.2 and 1Mbps link.

I noticed:
- the video loop back. Is there a way to stop this?

- part of the video is blocked from view.

- instead of auto-play, it would be good if this can be played manually

Btw, will this work together with your ViralPDF?

- Keith Choy

[Marty S]

Originally Posted by Josh Anderson

In the location just type an absolute url (including http://) when embedding media.

Here is a tutorial I put out 3 years ago showing how to put media in PDF. Its using Adobe Acrobat 6 pro but the concepts are essentially the same:

Ok ... just as I thought. Adobe worded this so feature badly, everyone reads the features list and thinks, "hey I can embed a youtube video". That is not correct and what you are describing here is an http: link to a particular flv file - which does work - we know that.

But that's not what this thread is about, and Sean's product is attempting to solve this issue, which for some reason, Acrobat Pro 9 cannot perform. I own it, and I tried it. That is, using a youtube web url address or embed code to play inside a PDF, hence avoiding excessive dowload times for PDFs with multiple videos.

As for your dated, but still decent tips for embedding a flash file, well Adobe Acrobat 9, and even Pages09 (free with imac) can do that in a New York minute simply by dropping a flash file in the document, but again, that's NOT what this thread is about. I know its confusing, because even on Adobe forums the issue - or feature is widely misunderstood.

So back to you Sean.... waiting...

[Josh Anderson]

Originally Posted by Marty S

avoiding excessive dowload times for PDFs with multiple videos.

As for your dated, but still decent tips for embedding a flash file, well Adobe Acrobat 9, and even Pages09 (free with imac) can do that in a New York minute simply by dropping a flash file in the document, but again, that's NOT what this thread is about. I know its confusing, because even on Adobe forums the issue - or feature is widely misunderstood.

It may not be what the op is about but I bet a lot of people enjoy knowing more about how to put media in PDF files and I provided the additional answer you requested on how to remote host the embedded media :-)

Also there is no additional download time for the PDF itself with multiple videos if you remote host... the video only loads when you play it and you can control the trigger that plays the video IE. mouse over, on click, etc. The best way to reduce the size of a pdf you wish to deliver with media embedded in it is to remote host the media files.

The player displayed by the OP is a nice use of the YT api used to pull the video in to be displayed by the swf.

[briguy]

Sean,

Hey there. No problems at all. I create PDFS like this at work for training purposes and it goes over well.

Trainees appreciate being able to have a folder of small PDF files, yet still have access training videos by simply opening the file.

Good luck!
brian

[Marty S]

Originally Posted by Josh Anderson

It may not be what the op is about but I bet a lot of people enjoy knowing more about how to put media in PDF files and I provided the additional answer after you asked me about how to remote host the media :-)

Also there is no additional download time for the PDF itself with multiple videos if you remote host... the video only loads when you play it and you can control the trigger that plays the video IE. mouse over, on click, etc. The best way to reduce the size of a pdf you wish to deliver with media embedded in it is to remote host the media files.

The player displayed by the OP is a nice use of the YT api used to pull the video in.

Again, not the answer for this thread, (YOUTUBE!!!) but good plugging for you - I understand!

[Sipboy3000]

It worked perfect for me.

This looks very interesting.

Since video is all the rage, this looks like a very promising way to share video content.

You think I could use them on document sharing websites like Scribd or Docstoc?

[Sean Kelly]

Marty, Martin, Stefan, Heman, Harry, Fernando, Josh, Gail, Astaga, Gary, SityWyde, Keith and Brian thank you ALL for your feedback (good and bad), I really appreciate it, I mean that.

So far its working fine in Windows but there is a problem with Flash on the Mac.

I'm delighted it works on Foxit reader as well, thanks for checking it out

The 'Fullscreen' will be removed from the Flv Player because it does not work when the flash player is embedded inside a PDF.
This seems to be a PDF limitation. I have code that will make PDFs open in fullscreen but that is something different, this is a 'flash in pdf' problem.

"Camtasia videos hosted in my own server?"
Yes, you can stream your video content from any server not only Youtube.

"part of the video is blocked from view."
Thats because of the size I set for the video, it's easily fixed: All you need to do is to drag the Flash into your Word document, resize it by dragging it's edges to the desired size and launch the PDF Converter.

"will this work together with your ViralPDF?"
ViralPDF rebrands text, links (and images soon), it would be easy to add video as well.

For YouTube you can stream the content directly (as seen in the PDF above) or you can use their API. If you use API the YouYube logo is not displayed and you can display viewer stats as well. I'm almost finished with the Flash player and it can stream with and without the YouTube API.

PDF Printer Pro can already embed video (.avi, .mov, .mp4, .mpeg, .swf, .flv) and audio (.mp3, .midi, .iff, .aiff, .smil), this thread is focused on getting streaming content working not embedded video and audio since that works already.
I don't know of any other PDF Converter that can create multimedia PDFs from your Word documents. Not even Acrobat Pro last time I tried it, you had to edit your PDF manually to add the video and audio afterwards.

Something to note is that Acrobat Reader will display a message any time you want to play multimedia in your PDF. This is Adobe, this is how it works and there is nothing I can do about this.

Things left to do:
1. Make it work on Mac (already started working on this). [Tricky but doable, ETA 2 to 3 days]
2. Don't auto-play [minor]
3. Switch off the looping [minor]
4. Complete the menu. (not coded yet) [minor]

Whats also cool is that if you have a transparent background you can embed a video of yourself that makes it look like you are walking around the PDF page.
You can have rotating banners, games, quizzes or anything you can dream of all thanks to Flash.

Yesterday I tried to create a subscription form in Flash but it did not submit the values entered. If it's not limited by the PDF reader I'll make it work. That would be nice as well and I'll include the Flash file for this.

Attached is a PDF with streaming content that works on my Mac. The Flash Player was added using with Acrobat Pro on the Mac so now we have proof it can work on the Mac, just need to get it working in the PDF Converter now

The main problem I see with this version is that it asks for user confirmation every time i tries to access a web resource. Damn annoying.

Thanks for all the help!
Sean

[Project-Octagon]

Hey Sean, That was pretty neat. Never seen a pdf video like that. I got a pop up prompt upon entry to press play and it was a very smooth transistion to the video. Good job!

[Sean Kelly]

Originally Posted by Sipboy3000

It worked perfect for me.
...
You think I could use them on document sharing websites like Scribd or Docstoc?

Unfortunately not since those sites convert the PDF into Flash, here is the PDF (Flash is broken) on Scribd:
Streaming YouTube Video in PDF

Sean

[Marty S]

Originally Posted by Sean Kelly

Attached is a PDF with streaming content that works on my Mac. The Flash Player was added using with Acrobat Pro on the Mac so now we have proof it can work on the Mac, just need to get it working in the PDF Converter now

The main problem I see with this version is that it asks for user confirmation every time i tries to access a web resource. Damn annoying.

Yes Sean this worked on my iMac when i Opened with A9, but it did not work with Preview. Web access clicking took numerous responses from me to get it to play - that is annoying.

[Keith Choy]

Hi Sean,

I just tested on another machine with:
- Win Vista
- Acrobat Reader 8.1.6

With this combination, I am not able to disabled the video. Not sure if there are any other folks having this same issue. The error message that I got is as shown below:

"This file appears to use a new format that this version of Acrobat does not support. It may not open or display correctly. Adobe recommends that you upgrade to the latest version of our Acrobat products."

- Keith Choy

[waken]

Hey Sean,
Nice one. When will this available?

Originally Posted by Sean Kelly

Unfortunately not since those sites convert the PDF into Flash, here is the PDF (Flash is broken) on Scribd:
Streaming YouTube Video in PDF

Sean

And do you think it can be further improved to maybe.. including flash videos?

Basically the file work fine on my pc ..
Windows XP, Foxit reader, just take a little longer to buffer and load the complete video compare to Youtube direct.