Breeze 4.1 – Conversion Problem Checklist

When you publish a presentation to Breeze, the Breeze server will convert it from a ppt file to a swf file. At times, the conversion process will hang causing the conversion to fail and most of the time these problems are due to the Breeze server being miss-configured. I have outlined here the most common configurations that will cause Breeze conversions to fail.

Each step outlined below is very important and all need to be performed in order to solve conversion problems.

1. Make sure you have the latest release of Breeze 4.1, 4.0, or Breeze 3.07. (if you have 3.07 r137 then you need to upgrade to 3.07 r146, 4.0 to 4.02 r193 or 4.1 to 4.1 r115). When you start Breeze it will print the exact version in the c:\breeze\logs\breeze.log file.

You can get the latest releases here (use your company name and serial number to login): http://www.macromedia.com/bin/breeze_license.cgi

2. Make sure you have a local printer driver installed on port LPT1 (a network driver won’t work)

3. Make sure you install(ed) Office (PowerPoint) from the servers local drive, this means, you need to copy the Office (PowerPoint) CD to the servers local hard drive and install it from that local drive.

Breeze may require PowerPoint to install components at runtime. If the install files are not local you will have conversion problems.

4. Make sure you have the latest Flash Player on the server, using a browser go to http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash

Breeze will need the latest Flash Player on the Breeze server for some conversions.

5. Make sure you don’t have MS Image Writer installed as a printer (Office will install this driver). If so, you need to remove it.

6. We have seen a few times now where one conversion will hold up all conversions, they will queue up. Most recently, it was converting a long recording of Live. To fix that problem do the following:
a) Open Task Manager
b) Kill the following processes:
1. -fastppt2xml.exe
2. -DW.exe
3. -PowerPNT.exe
Order is important.
c) Restart Breeze

This will trigger Breeze to re-convert all presentations and will clear up the problem. The error that we saw in the breeze.log was this:

[11-11 12:15:37] R166 (d) 44174:1-denbreeze-powerpoint Executing cmd /c C:\breeze\appserv\win32\builder\arch2xml C:\breeze\content\7/44174//*.flv [11-11 12:15:37] T105 (d) Executing cmd /c C:\breeze\appserv\win32\builder\arch2xml C:\breeze\content\7/44174//*.flv [11-11 12:21:37] T106 (d) Run time limit exceeded. Task aborted.

Helpful TIPS

PSKILL info and instructions:
PowerPoint can hang when fed a corrupted presentation. Some corruptions invoke the installer. This is relatively rare. But when it happens, the builder cannot recover.

To recover from a PowerPoint hang of this type, you need to kill fastppt2xml.exe, then dw.exe, then setup.exe, then POWERPNT.EXE (Order is important.)

If this is a frequent problem, it is possible to extend the restart logic in Breeze to automatically recover. tskill (the built-in Windows command we use) cannot always recover from this situation. pskill (a third party tool) is superior at recovering PowerPoint.

Download pskill here:

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/pskill.shtml

Save it to c:\breeze\appserv\win32\builder.

Then, modify restart-te.bat to use pskill, like this:

@echo off
%~dp0pskill fastppt2xml > nul: 2> nul:
%~dp0pskill powerpnt > nul: 2> nul:

Flash Movies:
When creating Flash movies, you must publish as flash 6 and action script 1.0. We currently have Flash Authoring MX, version 7. We won’t support publishing to Flash 7 until Breeze 5.0.

PPT problems:
If none of the above help, it could be a specify ppt file causing a problem, then you may next to delete slide by slide to find the problem slide (work from a copy until you find the problem).