The Adobe Flash Player ActiveX control for Internet Explorer 7 (I don’t know about IE6) will not disconnect NetConnections if the connection was made by a swf instance loaded in a tab and only that tab was closed. If IE itself is closed though the NetConnection will be dropped. This could lead to hung “ghost” connections where you won’t hear any audio, etc. but your Wowza Media Server (and maybe Flash Media Server, who knows?) will still think the client is connected.

Explanation

Laziness on the part of two large corporations.

Solution

Register a JS handler function for window.onbeforeunload that uses the Flash ExternalInterface to call a function in your swf that manually closes the NetConnection. The event “onbeforeunload” is recognized and executed by IE, Safari and Firefox before the onunload event is fired. It is apparently not handled by Opera AFAIK but that’s ok since IE is the only one that actually needs this fix.

In your ActionScript 3 code somewhere:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

 
import flash.external.ExternalInterface;
 
....
 
private someFunction():void{
 
if( ExternalInterface.available ){
 
ExternalInterface.addCallback("disconnect", disconnect);
 
}
 
}
 
private function disconnect():void {
 
_my_net_connection1.close();
 
}

In your Javascript code for the page that loads your swf:

 
window.onbeforeunload = function(){
 
// pure JS
 
var swf = document.getElementById('mySwf');
 
swf.disconnect();
 
// jQuery 1.2.6 version
 
$("#mySwf")[0].disconnect();
 
}

The End