Camtasia 2.0 Flash Problems with Firefox and Macs

Something strange has been happening this term with students trying to access my recorded lectures in Flash format (e.g. CHEM241). At first it was Mac users, which was surprising because I know that there was not a problem for at least a year before that. Then I noticed that I could no longer access Flash recordings using Firefox.

Since I also offer my lectures in m4v format viewable in iTunes or with a Quicktime player, Mac users could still get access to the video content. Also the Firefox problem does not show up on Internet Explorer. Once again, here is an example where taking the time to build in a redundancy really pays off. But it is still annoying for everybody.

I asked Tim Jones, the webmaster for our CoAS server, to look into the issue and he found that the problem could be fixed by making a file location explicit. For example, for this lecture,

flashvars ="FA06CHEM241intro_config.xml"

is changed to

flashvars ="csConfigFile=FA06CHEM241intro_media/FA06CHEM241intro_config.xml"

Tim will have to write a script to fix all the affected files this weekend. Given Camtasia's popularity, I imagine a lot of people will be impacted by this. The problem seems to be limited to Camtasia 2. According to Kevin Owens, the Flash files produced by Camtasia 3 (and presumably 4) work fine on Macs. I think the Firefox on PC issue only popped up recently so I assume it is related to the Firefox 2 upgrade.