Best way to distribute Mimic movies?

[brette912]

I have created a Mimic movie but am having problems distributing it to my prospects. I created my movie and then wrapped the movie files and the Mimic movie viewer up in an installer. The installer adds the Mimic Movie Viewer installation .msi file to a directory and then executes it. After the Mimic Movie Viewer is installed it then adds the Mimic movie files to the /Data directory and creates a shortcut on the desktop to the main movie file. The problem I am having is that when the viewer is installed, it does not associate the .MCMOVIESYS with the viewer so that when the end user executes the main movie file for the first time, it doesn’t know what program to open it with (the Mimic Movie Viewer) and they get a Windows prompt wanting to know what program to use to open the files. The easy (and correct) answer is that the installation of the Mimic Movie Viewer should create a registry entry telling Windows that any file with the .MCMOVIESYS is opened with the Mimic Viewer but according to MadCap technical support, they do not do that. They informed me that you have to manually associate the files with the viewer the first time in order to work (open Mimic Movie Viewer >> File >> Open >> locate main file in windows). I find this very cumbersome for folks trying to distribute Mimic movies.

Does anyone have suggestions for an easier or proper way to distribute these files so the end user can simply double-click the movie files and have it run without prompts for the first time? If necessary, I will have to create my own registry entry (MadCap technical support suggestion) associating the file type with the viewer but that can get very complicated and I would rather exhaust all other possibilities first.

Thanks for any suggestions.

[lcharlesjohnson]

We had a big debate about this in my office. We had to build an output that didn't require any installation of any kind because the military computers that were going to show the movies did not allow any downloads or installs at all.

The only option was Flash. And so far, it's worked well. We tested it on a DoD laptop and it runs without an issue. What we did was put the project folder and a "Click Me" file on a CD. The file opened the project with all the movies straight from the CD. No problems.

If you use Flash output, please be aware that you will encounter some strange bugs that involve the transparency feature. So, when you preview a movie in the MadCap viewer, you won't see the issues. You'll only see them when you build with a Flash output. So be sure to build often (not just preview) to make sure everything looks good.

Hope this helps.