WARNING: there’s a bug in the new version of Flash Player Adobe released, the 10.1.53.64 Flash Player plug-in, with a bug in it. If your SWF REUSES the NetConnection, NetStream and Video object collection to play clip after clip, it will sooner or later lock up your browser. We tested with five video instances running simultaneously. Less powerful computers (the type most average folk have) locked-up quicker and the smaller the computer, the sooner it locked-up (sometimes as quickly as 10 seconds into the video play. When version 10.1.53.64 came out, what had worked flawlessly before (10.0.45.2), suddenly worked no longer. We stripped out thousands of lines of code (we got the test code down to about 60 lines) to discover the video play object was the problem. Adobe’s technical support were no help; in fact they were abysmal. When we called in for support, Adobe “Level 1” treated us like annoyances, almost with contempt and even their telephony (the lines get cut off randomly) was jaw-droppingly bad. We were sent up “Level 2” who never got back to us (shame on you Adobe.) The 10.1.82.76 patch did not fix the problem. Updating screen drivers might have helped (for hardware acceleration) but there’s no point in doing then when 95%+ of average users out there don’t know how, won’t or can’t. There’s a memory leak in there somewhere. When debugging, we could see available memory drop to zero shortly before the screen freezes. To get round the problem we delete all three video objects and instantiate a new collection for every single move clip that is played. Given that it was/is THEIR bug, Adobe’s poor support and response was shocking to us.
