Flash skin not loading

This is a little Flash Tip / reminder-to-self. If you search Google it seems to be a common problem for the transport, control skin not to load for Flash movies. I finally found the answer on the Adobe site … duh. Usually you publish your movie in the same folder containing your .fla, movie .swf, .flv, and .swf for the skin. It all works when you play the .swf locally, but on a web server the skin doesn’t load. The oddity is, on your web server the .flv stays in the same directory as the .swf for your movie, but the default location for the skin .swf, is the directory the html file loading the .swf is located.

An example, in case the verbal description was not entirely clear –

public_html/
    my-awesome-vacation-video.htm
    some-cool-skin.swf
    flash_movies/
        vacation-video.swf
        vacation-video.flv

 
This is not the only possible structure. You can specify different locations when you create your movie in Flash, but this represents a default structure if you don’t want to store your Flash movies in the root of your web directory.

In the example above, if Flash spit out my-awesome-vacation-video.htm, you would need to edit the path for vacation-video.swf to flash-movies/vacation-video.swf. There are several ways to insert a Flash movie into a web page so I am not going to give a code snippet here. Check out swfobject for an easy, cross browser method for loading a Flash movie.

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