Audio and Video

Sometimes movies and sounds in PDF, SWF, and DPS files do a better job of explaining things than plain ol’ quiet, static print. For instance, watching a movie about how to change the oil in your car might help more than trying to figure it out from ten pages of printed diagrams and explanations.

For movies, you should place FLV, F4V, SWF, or any video file with H.264 encoding, such as MP4. For sounds, place MP3 files. These formats take advantage of the rich media support offered in Acrobat 9 or later and Flash Player 10 or later.

But what about AVI, MOV, and MPEG videos and WAV, AIF, and AU sound files? They should play just fine in interactive PDF files, but they don’t work in exported SWF files. Use the Adobe Media Encoder application to convert video file formats to FLV or F4V. Adobe Media Encoder doesn’t convert audio files, but you can use a program like Apple iTunes to do that.