Website on CD Rom

[webweaver]

I will try to be as brief, yet detailed as possible.

I am creating a CD Rom demo (Capabilities CD for a Marketing firm) for my work. It combines Flash and JavaScripting elements in an HTML environment.

There are three parts to this demo:
1.) Intro - Produced all in Flash, opens to full screen and is what the autorun command runs (the intro.exe)

2.) Prologue - This is an HTML page, with a couple of Flash elements embedded into it. At the end of the prologue the user clicks into another HTML page.

3.) Content - The rest of the demo is all HTML pages with a Flash menu element for navigation and a JavaScript image slide show. The rest of the content is plain HTML text with CSS.

Now, when I burn the CD it runs fine the way it should on my computer. I am running Windows 2000 and IE6. I ran it on the bosses computer and the only problem was that the Prologue window did not load on top of the Intro like it should have. He is running Windows XP with IE6.

I tried it on the receptionists computer, which is also an XP machine (only a month old) with IE6. Intro and Prologue play as they should, however when the HTML Content pages come up, everything is skewed and not positioned the way they should according to the CSS.

I took it home, on my home desktop computer which is an older 98 machine running IE5. Everything ran fine until the HTML Content in which for some strange reason the Flash Menu element got flipped upsidedown and backwards!!!!!! ?????

I took it to a friends, running XP and IE6, it was FINE... no problems at all.

Brought it back home, ran it again on my home desktop 98 machine and voile! It ran without incident.

I burned a new copy today thinking maybe the other copy was posessed by the amount of discontent and duress it was made under and I had cursed it unintentionally... but when playing the new copy in the receptionists computer it still had the same problem formating the elements on the page.

I am so frustrated and don't even know where to begin to attempt to trouble shoot such a strange problem. Has anyone else out there had any strange dealings like that or does anyone have any idea why I would get so many different experiences and problems using virtually the same browser on all the machines?

Sorry it took so long to get this all out.. but I am stumped and it's driving me bananas!
Thanks in advance!

Sandy

[webweaver]

Thanks for reading the long post on my CD project problems.. I have since gotten some of the bugs out but still having issue with trying to detect resolution,... see other post.

[paulhiles]

Hi Sandy,

Just for my own curiosity, what errors did you find? I couldn't figure out exactly where the problems might be... but some of the reported symptoms seemed to point to cross-browser compatibility issues and peculiarites between different browser versions.

Did you end up loading a Flash viewer along with the swf file itself? Also, did you use any particular software package to bundle the CD content or did you use the autorun.inf file? I'd be interested in finding out more about the approach you took! :o)

Paul

[webweaver]

There weren't any error messages per-say, it was just that one machine needed an update for macromedia flash, then that cleared up that problem and since my original post, the bugs have been pretty much cleared up except for my most recent problem. (See my browser resoliution detection thread)

Well The previous CD we did I did all in Flash and made it a movie projector file (.exe)... this time I wanted to just use Flash elements instead of creating the whole thing that way....

So, I have a flash projector intro that is triggered by the autorun.inf. The intro is short and just has a "enter" button which goes to a html page that has a javascript on it to detect browser. (This script I found moments before you answered my other question about that issue!) The browser detect.htm does it's job and it works fine,... depending on if it finds that the resolution is less than 1024x768 it redirects to the directory where the 800x600 version is.

The files beyond this are all .htm files with Flash elements embedded into them.

Basically it kind of turns into a website on a CD at that point where there is navigation to specific areas for sample work.

The bulk of it is all HTML with exception to the very first element of the cd, the intro.exe file which I wanted to have some sort of way for the CD to just start and get into the demonstration without the user having to click on anything or load a file from the disk manually... I would have opted to just have it bring up the initial detect HTML file, but when I tried to insert a .htm file reference in the autorun.inf it didn't like it, so back to the executeable intro to get the client into the cd.

Whew.. hope that made some sense.. at this point in the project my brain is mush and I really can't stand to see it anymore!! LOL

Thanks again for your help Paul!

[whartman]

I find that the following works in the autorun.inf file to initially open an HTML page.

[autorun]
SHELLEXECUTE=index.html

Other approaches seem to work for some windows versions but not for others.

[paulhiles]

Thanks for that whartman.. I recognise that technique. PBITech
suggested the same method when this topic came up in the Site Design forum a little while back.
He also supplied a link to the program itself... no harm in repeating it here! :o) http://develooper.com/code/shellexecute/ the program is free to download and at 36kb is nice and lightweight! Works with most versions of Windows from Win95 upwards.

Paul

[webweaver]

Thanks for that whartman.. http://develooper.com/code/shellexecute/ the program is free to download and at 36kb is nice and lightweight! Works with most versions of Windows from Win95 upwards.

Paul

Thanks guys! Now would I include that shellexecute program on the CD I take it?

Cool, thank you so much...

Sandy

[paulhiles]

Now would I include that shellexecute program on the CD I take it?

Yep.. you got that right Sandy! ;o)

(this taken from the website)
How to use
Put the program with a file called "autorun.inf" in the root of your CD. The autorun.inf file should look like the following:
[AutoRun]
OPEN=ShellExecute index.html
You should substitute index.html with the name of your html file if you call it something else (like Start.html).

Let us know how you get on! :o)
hope the boss is happy too! LOL!!

Paul

[webweaver]

Now would I include that shellexecute program on the CD I take it?

Yep.. you got that right Sandy! ;o)

Let us know how you get on! :o)
hope the boss is happy too! LOL!!

Paul

Well I had to sacrifice a few things and give up on a couple more, but this particulare item saved me!

THANK YOU VERY MUCH... I just ditched the intro.exe and changed a few other things around to work around the problems I was having. I literally was about to have a break down because everytime I would try it in a different machine I would get a different result. But thanks to your suggestions, I have been able to keep almost all my hair intact.... thank you!!!!

Sandy

[obietemp]

Hi
I am COMPLETELY in the dark here. I am considering transferring my html web page files to a CD for a client. I thought all I had to do was make sure that files all pointed to the root file, which would be in the CD. Of Course I haven't tried this yet.

I use dreamweaver. How can I transfer the files to a CD and make it act like a web page when the user clicks on the opening page? I want it to work in a Mac AND a PC.

Do I have to make some sort of exe file? I've never done that. Oh, please, tell me how.....exactly.

Thanks Pat
river-tree.net