Macromedia acknowledges streaming bug

Macromedia has added the following technote: Macromedia: Macromedia Flash Player 6 Streaming Issue

The problem, to quote Macromedia:

“when loading media into Macromedia Flash Player 6, the media will continue to load even if Macromedia Flash Player 6 makes additional requests for media (i.e. .swf, .jpg or .mp3 files), or if the user leaves the web page. “

John Dowdell says he hasn’t seen many posts about this being a problem for anyone, so I guess I should stand up and tell you about our problems at Flashmagazine.com.

We have been lucky enough to avoid most of the problems associated with the bug (at least we have no way of really knowing that it is affecting us day to day). But we have had examples of how bad it could become, one user caused a download of more than 360 MB over 1 hour on our site this month, with the Flash 6 player and while downloading very big files, files we used to use in our Flash radio system. The nature of the player and the way streaming has been possible without any problems in Flash until the now infamous Flash 6 player, allowed us to let users stream large audio files. If we had the Flash radio up and running today, we would probably have needed to shut it down since users were supposed to start streams, jump in them, and switch between them at choice.

I can only imagine how the bug must affect people making available larger video files with the new video capability in Flash MX (Since the bug is well known by now, I have a feeling few would be foolish enough to do that right now). I think the bug is a ugly and bad one, and actually worse than the XML bug that plagued the first versions of the Flash 5 player.

I am looking forward to Macromedia releasing an updated version of their Flash 6 player addressing this serious issue.