Strange lack of scaling/resizing of an embedded swf-animation

Question

I am a noob in adding animations. I'm making progress, but new problems apparently show up all the time. Hardly a surprise actually. Anyway.

System: WinEdt 7.0, MikTeX 2.9, Windows 7

\documentclass{powerdot}

\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
%\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[finnish]{babel}

\usepackage{amsmath,amssymb}
%\usepackage{psfrag}
\usepackage{media9}

\begin{document}
\begin{slide}{Esimerkki D1}
Sykloidiksi kutsuttu käyrä on $x$-akselia pitkin sutimatta vierivän yksikköympyrän kehältä
kiinnitetyn yhden pisteen ympyrän pyöriessä piirtämä käyrä.
\includemedia[
      width=200pt,
      height=70pt,
      activate=pageopen,
    ]{}{sykloidi.swf}
\end{slide}
\end{document}

The file sykloidi.swf is a video of a cycloid being drawn (generated by Mathematica, but that is probably irrelevant).

The above compiles all right via the DVI->PS->PDF route. The resulting PDF slide set looks good otherwise, but when I started zooming in Adobe Reader (going to full screen mode is enough) I was very surprised to notice that the size of the animated area remained the same, and the gap created by zooming is filled in with black.

This is IMHO bizarre. I do realize at some level that video may have a built-in unscalable resolution, but SWF is vector graphics, and it is supposed to scale, right?

I tried to insert a scale variable (giving it a modest value like 1.2), but that only made the surrounding box bigger (it overflowed outside the slide eventually).

So how does the syntax of scaling work in media9? I tried to find it in this document, but unfortunately couldn't make head or tails out of that. Is there something like "media9 for dummies" somewhere that you would recommend? Googling gave some hits, but the documents referred to external programs in Mac OS or seemed to depend on TikZ or...

Edit1: I know nothing about the internal structure of various video formats. But still images (irrespective of whether they were originally .png, .eps) scale with the rest of the document when viewed in Adobe Reader, why is video different? I realize that the problem may be elsewhere, in which case I should ask, whether anyone can diagnose the problem.

Edit2: It is possible that the technically correct term I need is resizable as opposed to scalable. As I said, I'm ignorant about such differences.

Answer 1

The scaling behaviour (Stage.scaleMode property, see ActionScript-2 reference) of Mathematica-generated SWF files is hard-coded to noScale.

Although SWF is binary, the place in the file where Stage.scaleMode is defined, can be edited in some text editors, such as vi or sed. Fortunately, the string noScale has the same length as showAll and we can replace the former with the latter, without corrupting the SWF file:

sed -i 's/noScale/showAll/' sykloidi.swf

showAll as the value of scaleMode will produce the wanted behaviour.

Answer 2

Here's how I solved the problem using several bits of advice from AlexG. Listing the steps here just in case somebody else will later have problems figuring out how to port a Mathematica animation into a powerdot/media9 slide set.

• Export the animation from Mathematica in AVI-format. The online help of Mathematica gives you the syntax of that command.
• Use this online service to convert the AVI to MP4. Of course, there are other ways of doing this, but I found ffmpeg a bit intimidating :-)

• For very basic functionality use a code-snippet like the following:

  \includemedia[
        width=200pt,
        height=200pt,
        addresource=./sykloidi.mp4,
        activate=pageopen,
        flashvars={source=./sykloidi.mp4&loop=true}
      ]{}{VPlayer.swf}
  

• You need to click the animation area with a mouse, and hit the spacebar to pause/continue, if you do it exactly like this. There are other options. See the package documentation for those. Here sykloidi.mp4 is the out put of the converter. I keep it in the same folder as the source code, so I didn't need to type in the entire path.

I tested this and now the animation area will resize as desired, when I zoom the Adobe Reader view of the produced slide set.