6 ms·

I teach high school students from time to time and over the years I have accumulated a large library of STEM training material. Of which there are a lot of Powe

I teach high school students from time to time and over the years I have accumulated a large library of STEM training material. Of which there are a lot of PowerPoint slides with interactive Flash content embedded. When MS and Adobe turned off Flash for Windows, the MS Office flash plugins also stopped working. I had to set up a VM running windows 7 to be able to use them again. It is not as smooth as running powerpoint natively but it's good enough for classroom demonstrations. However when students ask me to share the slides I have to tell them that while they are welcome to have it, about half of the stuff won't work properly because of a rich media plugin they are too young to have heard about. Besides, I don't want to teach them how to set up their own VM, and I doubt they are willing to go that far. I have spent some time looking into this problem and have not found any third party tools that will allow embedded flash to work again. So much for the digital dark age.

alexjurkiewicz 5y ago
That content must be teen years old now. It seems ok for training materials to be refreshed once a decade.
- ls15 5y ago
  Some flash content is incredibly creative and complex. Chances are that it just gets replaced with less interesting content.
jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago
15 year old students are too young to know flash? Damn, I'm actually getting old
- bombcar 5y ago
  Homestar Runner is old enough to buy you cold ones.
- hajile 5y ago
  Steve Job's letter on flash is 12 years old now. https://www.statista.com/chart/3796/websites-using-flash/ https://www.statista.com/chart/3796/websites-using-flash/ Flash lost half of its marketshare down to 15% by 2014. I'd wager that most of the remaining sites were more niche or legacy and probably not seen by a 7 year old kid under general circumstances.
causality0 5y ago
You could package it up and give it to them to run on VMware Player.
- toast0 5y ago
  Licensing would be tricky. Windows and PowerPoint are not friendly to being distributed like that.
TheDong 5y ago
> I have spent some time looking into this problem and have not found any third party tools that will allow embedded flash to work again. I'm curious if you've tried ruffle: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle It will not work for exactly your problem (powerpoint plugin vs html5 webpage), but I've found most relatively simple flash programs run under it. If the embedded flash content you've got is relatively simple, you might be able to run it in a browser with ruffle. At which point you could swap out the powerpoint presentation from embedding flash alone, to embedding flash + having a link to a webpage for modern powerpoint users, which wouldn't make for good presentations, but would be better than nothing for students reviewing it.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  AS3 movies won't work yet. We have a runtime implementation, but adapting our existing display tree for it has been... not a fun time. I have an active PR that fixes a lot of long-standing order-of-operations bugs in Ruffle but it's stalled on... uh... review, mostly. Also, it has a few minor bugs still, especially involving gotos in event handlers, because gotos are evil. I've considered actually porting Ruffle to COM/OLE, which is how you're able to embed Flash in Powerpoint[0]. However, the current state of Rust COM bridging is... not great. I'm actually working on the opposite of that right now: embedding Flash Player itself in a host binary so I can stream automated input into it. I need this to track down those remaining event handler bugs I mentioned. [0] Fun fact: Pretty much all ActiveX components are embeddable in Office, because ActiveX is just "WebOLE". Turns out Microsoft had solved the problem of "sticking apps in other apps and having scripting code access them" years prior to the Web being a thing.
  - stuaxo 5y ago
    Lots of great info here. It's heartening to hear that AS3 is being worked on, I'm sure you'll get the issues sorted. I wonder when something like OLE will happen again, but with webassembly based apps ?
    - kmeisthax 5y ago
tomc1985 5y ago
Is there any way to re-embed them with OLE?
- fredoralive 5y ago
  Flash in Internet Explorer used ActiveX[1], which basically was OLE at its core, so that'll almost certainty be the way Flash content was embedded into PowerPoint originally. [1] Other browsers used NPAPI as the plugin system.
zakki 5y ago
I think the quick solution is to record the screen while you play the flash. If not mistaken virtual box has a built in video recorder. Edit: Oh you said it is an interactive flash. Screen recording won’t do it.

alexjurkiewicz 5y ago

That content must be teen years old now. It seems ok for training materials to be refreshed once a decade.

ls15 5y ago
Some flash content is incredibly creative and complex. Chances are that it just gets replaced with less interesting content.

jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago

15 year old students are too young to know flash? Damn, I'm actually getting old

bombcar 5y ago
Homestar Runner is old enough to buy you cold ones.
hajile 5y ago
Steve Job's letter on flash is 12 years old now. https://www.statista.com/chart/3796/websites-using-flash/ https://www.statista.com/chart/3796/websites-using-flash/ Flash lost half of its marketshare down to 15% by 2014. I'd wager that most of the remaining sites were more niche or legacy and probably not seen by a 7 year old kid under general circumstances.

causality0 5y ago

You could package it up and give it to them to run on VMware Player.

toast0 5y ago
Licensing would be tricky. Windows and PowerPoint are not friendly to being distributed like that.

TheDong 5y ago

> I have spent some time looking into this problem and have not found any third party tools that will allow embedded flash to work again. I'm curious if you've tried ruffle: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle It will not work for exactly your problem (powerpoint plugin vs html5 webpage), but I've found most relatively simple flash programs run under it. If the embedded flash content you've got is relatively simple, you might be able to run it in a browser with ruffle. At which point you could swap out the powerpoint presentation from embedding flash alone, to embedding flash + having a link to a webpage for modern powerpoint users, which wouldn't make for good presentations, but would be better than nothing for students reviewing it.

kmeisthax 5y ago
AS3 movies won't work yet. We have a runtime implementation, but adapting our existing display tree for it has been... not a fun time. I have an active PR that fixes a lot of long-standing order-of-operations bugs in Ruffle but it's stalled on... uh... review, mostly. Also, it has a few minor bugs still, especially involving gotos in event handlers, because gotos are evil. I've considered actually porting Ruffle to COM/OLE, which is how you're able to embed Flash in Powerpoint[0]. However, the current state of Rust COM bridging is... not great. I'm actually working on the opposite of that right now: embedding Flash Player itself in a host binary so I can stream automated input into it. I need this to track down those remaining event handler bugs I mentioned. [0] Fun fact: Pretty much all ActiveX components are embeddable in Office, because ActiveX is just "WebOLE". Turns out Microsoft had solved the problem of "sticking apps in other apps and having scripting code access them" years prior to the Web being a thing.
- stuaxo 5y ago
  Lots of great info here. It's heartening to hear that AS3 is being worked on, I'm sure you'll get the issues sorted. I wonder when something like OLE will happen again, but with webassembly based apps ?
  - kmeisthax 5y ago

tomc1985 5y ago

Is there any way to re-embed them with OLE?

fredoralive 5y ago
Flash in Internet Explorer used ActiveX[1], which basically was OLE at its core, so that'll almost certainty be the way Flash content was embedded into PowerPoint originally. [1] Other browsers used NPAPI as the plugin system.

zakki 5y ago

I think the quick solution is to record the screen while you play the flash. If not mistaken virtual box has a built in video recorder. Edit: Oh you said it is an interactive flash. Screen recording won’t do it.