Real Player 11 seems to be causing a number of problems with Flash applications. This page is meant to document the known issues (and workarounds if they are found).

Some of the Real Player issues are just annoyances and don’t really cause the SWFs to break. They should be documented here.

Real Player 11 adds a mini-toolbar with a “Download This Clip” button. This appears at the top-right of the movie and appears initially on load and whenever the user mouses over the SWF.

RP does seem to attempt some kind of detection to see if a video clip is present, but it appears to have false positives in the current implementation.

Workarounds:

The user has the option of turning off the mini-toolbar from the RealPlayer options.

Along with the mini-toolbar discussed above, RP adds an entry to Flash’s right-click menu labeled “Download This Video To RealPlayer”. This seems to appear more often than the mini-toolbar.

Some of the Real Player issues actually cause the Flash applications to break. These should be documented here.

RP11 seems to be breaking the cleanup of LocalConnections when a SWF is unloaded, preventing any new SWFs from using that LocalConnection.

Here’s a simple example:

1. SWF1 loads in frame A
2. SWF2 loads in frame B
3. SWF2 opens LocalConnection called “toSWF1”
4. Frame B navigates to a new URL
5. Frame B navigates back to URL with SWF2
6. SWF2 loads in frame B
7. SWF2 loads LocalConnection called “toSWF1”

Without RealPlayer 11 installed this works fine. However, with RP11 installed the last step fails.

Hello, I am Russ Ryan from Real Networks. I manage the development team for Real Player 11. We take problems that break sites seriously and want to fix the problem you report here. I have a question: I am not understanding why in step 7 SWF2 loads LocalConnection call “toSWF2” - that seems to defeat the purpose of the LocalConnection method. Was that a typo? Also, what version of Flash and what version of ActionScript are you using? Thanks.

Yea, that was a typo, fixed it now. This was using the latest version of the Flash player. The SWFs are built using AS2 and targeted to Flash 7 (built using the Flash 8 “IDE”).

If you want I can provide a ZIP file with the code and built SWFs that I used to reproduce this error. If you want to discuss this more, e-mail me at aherrman @ <that google mail domain> . com so we don’t spam this page too much (and so we each know when the other responds). ~Andy