[RESOLVED] Embedded windows media player - Will it work if the user does not have WMP installed?

[vitalcoaching]

Hi,

A simple question.

I will start posting videos soon on my site and wanted to double check this:

With an embedded windows media player - Will it work if the user does not have WMP installed on their computer?

The code I think of using is this one:

<embed src="http://mywebsite.com/myfile.wmv" width="100" height="63" autostart="0" showcontrols="1" type="application/x-mplayer2" pluginspage="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download/"> </embed>

I am not familiar with how the plugin actually works

Any idea?

Thanks a lot!

[viatech]

Someone has to have a codec on their system that is setup to play wmv files. I don't know much about macs but on Linux you can install some that would get the job done, and windows obviously has them. As far as windowsmedia itself, not everyone is going to have a media player that is setup to execute that plugin and there may be compatability issues. Your best bet is to try a different file type if you're hoping to reach all audiences on the web. .mov files will work for anyone with quicktime installed and mpeg has always been a more widely used extension because it's been around so long, even though you may occasionally have issues between Operating Systems because Mac's prefer the file extension of .mpeg rather than .mpg. Chances are anyone who is on the web today has flash plugins installed for their browser. It offers a great way to view streaming video and is the route I recently chose to go with. Plus if you host it on google video you can embed it to your page and use their resources.

[vitalcoaching]

Thanks viatech. It's exactly the type of info I was looking for.

The reason I tend to opt of a .wmv file is because of size.

It seems that 1 minute .wmv file can be reduced to 1.5 MB

while 1 minute .mov goes to 3.5 MB or more

A flash file goes to 6.5 MB

I get the feeling that a flash movie will have difficulties streaming on a dial or moderate ADSL connection..

Is this a problem for you?

How do you deal with it?

At this stage, I don't think I can go with the google video hosting option because of branding reasons...

What's your site? can I have a look?

Thanks again

[viatech]

http://film.tuner-tech.com Site is really basic right now, especially considering all the video I have, but in time I'll have it all up there. To be honest, streaming through dialup is NEVER going to be easy. The connections are too unstable and the intermittent characteristics of dialup cause a lot of buffering to stop or timeout. In my experience with dialup (and its a thorough one) flash is more stable than streaming video. If you want to have the option, I would make a downloadable wmv file readily available for whomever wants to download it. On one of our sites we have streaming wmv files but I would hate to try and access them on dialup. Those are here: http://centralvalleystudios.com/video/ccg.html

[felgall]

Web file sizes are measured in kilobytes NOT megabytes. You might get away with a 1Mb download but for embedded files the entire page should be under 80k.