PDFs are ubiquitous and have been with us for years. What a lot of people don't realize, though, is that video can be embedded within them. This is a great idea, but it's not without its pitfalls. There are some rather serious compatibility issues to consider. If you can control where the files will be played back (for example, it's for internal use within a company and you know that the IT department has a certain version of Adobe Acrobat Player installed on all of the machines), then it might be a serious option. If, however, you're just going to encode some video in a PDF and then release it to the public...well, be prepared to waste a lot of time on customer support. There will be plenty of people calling up complaining that the PDF won't open, or the video won't play back, etc. etc., which is not fun.
It's been possible to embed video in a PDF for a while now, but until recently it always required that an external player also be installed on the user's computer. Universal playback was far from certain due to a whole host of issues from different video formats, systems and software versions. The latest version of Adobe Acrobat Pro, however, allows you to embed flash video within a PDF, which will play back without having to worry about whether or not a specific player is installed on that computer. Although this is a marked improvement, the system is far from perfect. There are still plenty of ways for your video not to play back. For example, the user has to view the PDF with a version of Adobe Acrobat Reader that supports the video playback functionality. If you encoded something with Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 and the user tries to play back that file with an old version of Adobe Acrobat Reader, the file may not play back. Also, if someone uses another PDF viewer (like Preview on the Mac, for example), the video won't play back there either.
If someone just bought their computer 2 months ago and the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader is already on their computer, then it's not a problem - but if it's a "non technical" user, then something as simple as upgrading their version of Adobe Acrobat Reader can be challenging - which means that they can't view your video content - and if it's a product you've charged for, it will probably result in a return and/or complaint.
The point is, don't think you're going to put video into a PDF and never have a problem or issue with it (theoretically, it is possible, but practically speaking, it's unlikely). If you do decide to try this as an info product, my best advice is to be painfully clear with potential buyers. Post a clear warning letting people know that they MUST view the PDF using whatever version of Adobe Acrobat Reader you specify if they want to see the embedded video. This should take care of most of the issues, but there will almost certainly be someone who didn't read your warning (or is a little slow) who will give you problems.
If you do decide to encode video in a PDF, here's how you do it, and some of the issues and variables to be aware of...
First of all, in order to be able to create a PDF with video, you'll need a copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro. Even if you have Adobe Acrobat (that's the full version of the Adobe Acrobat program and not Acrobat Reader), you'll need to upgrade to the "Pro" version for the video embedding functionality. I recommend working with version 9 or higher.
Second, although you can embed "legacy multimedia content" (in other words, alternate video formats), going with Flash is going to be your best bet (unless you absolutely have to use a certain format for a specific reason). Flash will play back from within the PDF without having to worry about additional (external) players. This means the video has been encoded as Flash and will have.SWF or.FLV as the file name extension.
The way you embed video is: open your PDF (from within Adobe Acrobat Pro), go to Tools > Advanced Editing and select the Movie Tool. Use the tool to draw (drag) a box where you want to put your movie. A dialog box will appear asking you where the movie file is located and giving you several options. Note that you can choose to embed video or have it streaming from somewhere on the Internet. The advantage to streaming is that you can keep your PDF file size down, since the video is coming from somewhere else - and you can update the content anytime, but the disadvantage is that they won't be able to see the video without an active Internet connection, which can be inconvenient. Also, if they have a slow connection, the video may play back very poorly or not at all. It's up to you to weigh the pros and cons to see which option works best for your situation.
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