Below you will find links for three separate documents, the first two are meant to be used as replacement publish templates for Director MX and Director MX 2004 whereas the third is a general purpose JavaScript file. All three of these files use JavaScript or VBScript to detect and return the installed Shockwave Player version. The publish template files are meant for use when publishing from Director, if you attempt to use them as stand-alone files then they will require slight modification. The *.js file is meant for use on your website(s) in general and can be linked to from other documents and then have the getSWVersion() function called which returns a string indicating the installed Shockwave Player version (in the form of '<majorVersion>.<minorVersion>'), if no Shockwave Player is found (only valid back to SW7) then an empty string is returned.

These documents and more information will eventually be incorporated into two tech notes in the Macromedia Director Support Center:

Tech Note 14789: Site design strategies for Shockwave Player detection
Tech Note 15722: Detecting Shockwave Player using JavaScript

Please note that we may combine these two separate documents into one single tech note, the material is sufficiently related that this type of change might make sense.

downloads
MX_Detect.html (~4KB)
MX04_Detect.html (~4KB)
getSWVersion.js (~2KB)