.swf files frequently crashing activstudio

[paulmilham@waterford.og]

My team and I have been working on creating several flipcharts, but keep running into the same problem. Having .swf files on a page will cause activ studio to crash when loading that page about 10 percent of the time. We've tried everything we can think of to prevent the crashes, but nothing works. The .swf files seem to be fine. They aren't throwing any errors and we've tried AVM1 as well as AVM2. We're pretty much out of ideas how to fix this issue.

[paulmilham@waterford.og]

I'll post one of the offending flipcharts along with a video of it crashing in use.

[paulmilham@waterford.og]

I've attached the flipchart and several videos showing how the bug is reproduced by trying to access the vocabulary page. Please let me know if I can provide any more information to help fix this bug; it is hurting our ability to produce flip charts.

[Nigel Pearce]

Paul,

If it is any consolation this flipchart operates without any errors on two different systems here (one Xp and one Vista).
Is this problem confined to your development machine?

[paulmilham@waterford.og]

I'm not sure about Vista, Win7 or Mac, but we've had the crash happen across at least 5 different XP machines. We've tried updating board drivers and ActiveStudio. Nothing seems to work. The crash is very inconsistent, but common. These crashes only occur in ActivStudio as far as we can tell. They are not reproducible in ActivInspire. I'll speak with our QA department and try to get together some statistics on how often this is occurring as well as any other information that might be relevant. Please let me know if there is anything we can do to help you resolve this issue. It is a major concern for our product.

[paulmilham@waterford.og]

Here is the email I received from our QA department:

Paul-

OS: This has happened on XP and Vista. I have tested flip charts on a mac 10.5 a few times, with no problems. I haven’t done as much mac testing as windows testing, so I’m not confident in saying it never occurs on a mac. I just haven’t seen it occur on a mac, yet.
ActivStudio version: 3.7.19.
I don’t know the board driver version #, but it has occurred on the boards in room 102 and 209.
The % of times it crashes it too erratic to get any meaningful statistic.

The steps to reproduce are to just launch the flip chart in ActivStudio and go to a page with .swfs (like the vocab slider page), in presentation mode. You can get to that page any way you want, and it may crash.

Here are different ways I saw it crash, all within about 40 minutes, a few days ago (all on Windows XP):
7:30 – clicking next page, Waterford tool; acti-vote named mode
7:33 – clicking next page, Waterford tool; acti-vote demo mode
7:34 – clicking next page, Waterford tool; acti-vote anon mode
7:35 – going to vocab page in design mode, then switching to presentation mode
7:36 – using promethean next button
7:37 – clicking vocab page from main menu
(Restarted computer)
7:44 – clicking next page, Waterford tool
7:45 – from sequence of events, using Waterford back tool
7:46 – directly selected from promethean page organize tool
7:47 – directly selected from promethean page select tool
7:48 – while book video is playing (clicking Waterford next button)
7:51 – on my laptop, clicking vocab page from main menu
8:00 – on my laptop, on switching from design mode to presentation mode on the vocab page
8:07 – promethean next button
8:09 – (after non crash below), going to menu, and selecting vocab page from menu
8:10 – (after 2nd 8:10 non crash), clicking Waterford back from sequencing page (moved tiles not reset)

During that same time period, here is when it didn’t crash:
7:56 – on my laptop, using activinspire, using Waterford next button
7:57 – on laptop, activinspire, direct select from main menu
8:09 – on board, after moving sequencing tiles around and clicking check my answer and going back
8:10 – on board, after moving sequencing tiles around and going back
8:10 – on board, after moving sequencing tiles around and going back and clicking Waterford next button

Like I said, the crash frequency is so random, that I can’t give you any meaningful reproducibility numbers. There have been hours of testing when it doesn’t crash at all, then an hour like the one detailed above where it crashes almost every single time you go to a page with .swfs




Following up with QA I found out the driver versions for the crash are 5.1.1.25 and 4.1.14.20.

[Nigel Pearce]

Paul,

It sounds like this may be a very specific problem relating to one page or even one flash file. So perhaps the page has some corruption.

Try deleting the page and testing the remaining flipchart to confirm this theory.

Re-author the offending page and see if this helps.

If you suspect a specific SWF, try replacing it with another.

Or if you are setting the SWF to AutoPlay as you turn to the page, the combination of this specific SWF and AutoPlay might be an issue. So try turning AutoPlay off and see if that makes a difference.

Failing all this, tech support may have further information.

Finally as you have indicated, your flipchart works correctly in ActivInspire. Inspire is the product that is getting all the development attention here at Promethean. Is this a way forward for you?

[paulmilham@waterford.og]

As far we can tell, this is neither a problem with the specific page nor the specific swf file. We're still deciding where to go with this from a business standpoint, but it seems our best option is to just have people upgrade to Inspire if they experience problems. We've gone through many iterations of multiple flipcharts and swfs on different machines. It seems as if nothing we do reduces the frequency of the crash including turning off play automatically. I think this is a bug in the ActivStudio code having to do with loading swf files.