Shockwave

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The Shockwave Player for Macintosh and Windows, also known as the "Shockwave for Director" plugin (or simply, "Shockwave") is a viewer and browser plugin for multimedia and interactive web content created by the Macromedia Director authoring tool. The Shockwave player is the original Macromedia multimedia player and is often confused with the Flash player, as the name Shockwave was appended to the Flash player and Flash file format name for marketing reasons. [1]. Macromedia was acquired by Adobe Systems in December 2005.

Installing Shockwave

Mac and Windows users can download the Shockwave Player installer from http://get.adobe.com/shockwave/ or from Adobe's Shockwave Player Distribution Downloads page. [2] System requirements are listed here.

Uninstalling Shockwave

On Windows, use the Add/Remove programs feature in the Control Panel . On Mac OS, run the Shockwave installer, which contains the uninstaller [3].

Known Issues

Memory usage

Loading a page with Shockwave content can cause an immediate increase in memory usage, sometimes 100 MB or more [4]. If this memory use is undesirable, consider uninstalling the Shockwave Player, or disable the plugin by removing or renaming the plugin file. For example, on Windows, exit your Mozilla application, locate the file "np32dsw.dll" and rename it "Xnp32dsw.dll". Note that, starting in Firefox 3 and SeaMonkey 2, plugins can be disabled from the Add-ons Manager. See Issues related to plugins for more information.

Windows XP

On some Windows XP systems, Shockwave doesn't work[5] unless you set your Mozilla-based browser to run in "Windows NT 4" or "Windows 2000" compatibility mode. For details, see bug 225894.

Other issues

Other Shockwave issues are listed on the Shockwave Player Support FAQs page and at PluginDoc. If these sources do not help you fix your Shockwave problem, you can use this Adobe form to submit a Shockwave bug report.

External links