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I have a flash movie with a transparent background over a moving jQuery slideshow. Whenever the slides move (they slide horizontally) the logo's background lags in the sense that it cant keep up with rendering the correct background underneath. It is always a step behind (when the slideshow is in motion).

I am currently using 

so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");

In my flash code in order to render the background transparent.

Have you encountered this before? Do you know a fix?

It only seems to happen in Firefox, not Chrome, IE or Safari.

Example:enter image description here

Thanks! - Chris

Chris Bier
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    I'm afraid that's a known issue, that wmode=transparent effects performance a lot in some browsers, and I don't know any fix for it. – Lars Blåsjö Mar 01 '12 at 16:37
  • What kind of content are you displaying in the flash movie, i.e. how dependent is it on having to be transparent? – Oleg Mar 06 '12 at 08:29
  • It is the company logo with a transparent background so that the underlying graphic's background will show through. – Chris Bier Mar 06 '12 at 21:06
  • @ChrisB.: cool, cool. Could you confirm whether or not a) it's animated and b) does it happen to be a circle with an opaque middle? Think BMW, Volkswagen rather than Nissan – Oleg Mar 07 '12 at 08:58
  • @ChrisB.: have you had a chance to play with FPS setting in the movie? I'm curious to hear feedback on suitability of the approach in your particular scenario – Oleg Mar 11 '12 at 04:49

1 Answers1

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Background: the lags occur because of the way the plugin handles rendering depending on the wmode setting, "transparent" being a total hog (thanks, Captain Obvious!) To recap, there are five possible modes supported by the latest Flash Player: direct, gpu, opaque, transparent and window. Adobe knowledge base has a very decent overview of their specifics but it all comes down to using hardware acceleration or not and blending with overlaying/underlaying content. Unfortunately "transparent" is the only option suitable for your situation.

Fix: lower your flash movie FPS. Drop it down to something like "1" just for fun and test - if it works fine your options are either finding an equilibrium frame rate or (imo, a better option) arranging for javascript<->actionscript link so that whenever a slideshow movement starts the flash movie lowers FPS and bounces it back to normal upon completion. If lowering FPS doesn't work, weep manly and proceed in a different direction.

I see the overlay is a company logo - is it animated? If not, maybe you could have it saved as a transparent png and enjoy no performance degradation.

Oleg
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  • Yes it is an animated logo, thanks for the reply. For now I just disabled the flash animation and replaced it with a PNG in firefox. I will look into the things you suggested. I tried raising the frame rate but that didn't fix it, I didn't think to try lowering it. It is a logotype, so there are lots of transparent spots between the letters. – Chris Bier Mar 12 '12 at 14:22