Adobe Flash Lite 2.1 for Windows Mobile 5.0 Preview

Posted on September 13, 2006 | 9 comments

I have a Treo 700w and have been looking into Flash Players for the Window Mobile 5 OS since I got the phone. The PocketPC Flash Player 7 came out earlier this year and worked well with FLV’s but not Flex (at least with Treo 700w small memory size).

Yesterday Flash Lite 2.1 for Windows Mobile 5.0 was annouced as a preview on Adobe labs site. I went ahead and downloaded the Flash Lite player, copied it over through ActiveSync and installed in on my Treo 700w. You then have to navigate to the Program Files/Adobe/FlashLite folder and click on saplaywm.exe file. This creates a License document that you need to open and read. The License document provides a url and a key to register your Flash Lite player to your phone. All a bunch of steps, it feels weird registering a Flash Player to a device.

Now I need some content to test things out, but I didn’t know how to create it. I first opened my Treo 700w browser to see how it would handle regular Flash Player 7 SWF’s (Note: I still have PocketPC Flash Player 7 on the phone). Well, it seems Flash Lite 2.1 installed over the PocketPC Flash Player 7 because when I went to a site with Flash Player 7 SWF’s it gave me the below text in place of the SWF’s.

“Flash Lite 2.1 for Windows Mobile 5 will support Flash 7 content authored for mobile devices only.”

I went ahead and downloaded the Flash Lite update for Flash Professional 8. I downloaded and install the Flash Professional 8 updater and created a simple animation. I exported as Flash Lite 2.0 (no Flash Lite 2.1) and put it up on my server here. I fired up my Treo 700w and pointed to my test URL and to my disappointment I received the same message as above.

How do I create content for Flash Lite 2.1, that will work on Windows Mobile 5?

I see the Flash Lite 2.1 for BREW conversion kit stuff, but creating mobile content is a little confusing.

UPDATE:

The fix had to do with the HTML, this is what it is suppose to look like (note the different “classid”):

<object id="flash"
classid="CLSID:EB8B5B8E-EDB9-4180-9E2E-F8F1632DC171"
width="150" height="150">
<param name="movie" value="Flash2_1_test.swf" />
<param name="quality" value="low" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#110000" />
<param name="loop" value="true" />
</object>

Thanks Vijayan

You can also find the Windows Mobile 5 Flash Lite 2.1 documentation on labs.adobe.com.

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  • http://www.adobe.com Vijayan Reddy

    Hi,

    Please download the docs that come along with this release, and check the faq section at, http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashlite_wm5/#FAQ

    This will solve your problem.

    Regards,
    Vijayan Reddy,
    Adobe FlashLite Team.

  • olly gore

    When i first installed flash lite player and browsed on the internet everything worked fine embedded flash in the browser running beautifully. I reset my PDA and then I started recieving

    “Flash Lite 2.1 for Windows Mobile 5 will support Flash 7 content authored for mobile devices only.”

    My question is if it is fully possible for the content to load why would they ‘block it’. Is this because its a preview version?

  • http://www.renaun.com Renaun Erickson

    Is the content you created exported as Flash Lite 2.1? You have to create content specific to the player. Even though Flash Lite 2.1 says its Flash 7, its not the same as the Flash Player 7 content. Its a variation and you have to create content specific to it.

    And on top of that you have to create an html embed tag with a special ID to tell the browser its flash lite. Look at my example

    http://renaun.com/flashlite/Flash21test.html

    View the source html to see what HTML to use.

  • Heberth Flores

    after I installed flash lite 2.1 in my ipaq whit windows mobile 5.0 and I try to open some .swf appears a message ” if flash lite has not been registered for this device please open the license file for registration instructions… you licence path :\Program Files\AdobeFlashLite\License.txt..
    I opened the file and appear a URL that I can’t open..
    http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=flashlite_registration
    I thank the help in advance..

  • http://www.renaun.com Renaun Erickson

    the URL works for me on my desktop. I do not think you have to open the URL on the device it self… but it was a while ago i did this can’t remember off the top of my head.

  • http://evilman57orange.fr Evilman666

    WHY I can’t download Flash Lite on my Pocket PC? It’s a SPV M600 ( or Qteck S200 ). On all sites I can’t.

  • domokun

    Awesome. I’ve been banging my head over this for some time. I’m using WM5 on a smartphone, and your object code works well for that OS. Strange though how differently the screen positioning is rendered in PIE vs Opera 8.x. I also noticed on my test html page that of the four replicated flash animation objects that I have, they each start upon loading, which with a PC and broadband connection doesn’t matter, but for a smartphone on edge, it means their sequencing is off by a fraction of a second.

    My trial animation was just a 50×50 px square that blinked color. The four instances of this square that I placed in identical html code displayed them properly, but due to the latency of my edge connection, made them display off-phase to each other. Of course this can be fixed through actionscript, but this means that timing in flash lite movies is a much different thing that in regular flash.

  • JP

    I am slightly confused. Should I be installing Flash Lite 2.1 instead of Flash 7 for Pocket PC? From reading numerous posts I get the impression Flash Lite 2.1 supports Flash 7, but not really.Is there actually a benefit to it?

    I have a T-Mobile MDA Vario II running Windows Mobile 5. I’m a huge flash fan and desperate to start developing ideas for the mobile.

  • http://www.renaun.com Renaun Erickson

    Flash Lite 2.1 only works on certain devices and yes it is limited. On the flip side Flash Player 7 for PocketPC doesn’t work on all devices either. If you Windows Mobile 5 is a smart phone edition then the Flash Player 7 for PocketPC will not work.