Allowing Mozilla Users with the ActiveX Plug-in to Play Embedded Windows Media Player PresentationsWednesday March 17th, 2004tityre sent us a link to a Streamingmedia.com article that describes how Web developers can make their Windows Media Player presentations accessible to Mozilla users who have the Mozilla ActiveX plug-in installed. From the article: "Thankfully, the widespread adoption of standards by all the browsers has made it relatively simple matter to write Web sites that work seamlessly on any browser and operating system." The widespread adoption of standards by ALL the browsers? Has this author heard of Internet Explorer or ever attempted to design a standards-compliant page using (X)HTML and anything beyond basic CSS? Still, while I only skimmed through the rest of the article, it looks nice, and hopefully it'll provide some tips that authors can use to confront this issue. Doesn't this work WITHOUT having Active X installed in Mozilla? Sites like shockwave.com embed windows mediaplayer for me perfectly fine in Firefox. Seems so. The test link doesn't work for me and I can't install the plug-in because I'm using Linux. The DevEdge article (http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2003/windows-media-in-netscape/) is much better, explains the issue and why the ActiveX route is needed. Microsoft on purposley doesn't support scripting WMP9 in Mozilla, so at Netscape we had to come with a solution. Nothing standards compliant about this, and it only works on windows, and only if you install something. Interesting -- I had no idea that Netscape included ActiveX support in an official version. I for one would like to see this included in Mozilla builds as well. (There's nothing "standards compliant" about Netscape plugins either.) I have found that installing the ActiveX plugin makes flash unusable on many sites. Flash will register the first click to the embedded SWF but none after that. Some other people have reported this problem too, and I haven't been able to find a fix for it. I would love to install the ActiveX plugin, but because of the Flash issue, I can't. In Netscape 7.1 they found a solution to this problem, by default they shipped a preference file (activex.js) that only allowed the activex control to embed Windows media player and left other items (e.g. Flash) to the native plugins. I don't have access to the activex.js file in Netscape 7.1 but I'm sure it's documented somewhere. am I the only person that doesn't like embeded media, I see the fact that I can open media in its proper application a bonus for firefox, and one of it's advantages over IE (and that it doesnt randomly decide to start re-embeding media) There are alternate players (like http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage). It sounds to me like someone could write an OS-independent Mozilla extension that imbeds the most commonly used codecs (with potential for additional ones). It would allow emulation of the most commonly used WMP activeX functionality without actually implementing activeX or using WMP. That is, when something like <object classid="clsid:6BF52A52-394A-11d3-B153-00C04F79FAA6"> or <object classid="clsid:6BF52A52-394A-11d3-B153-00C04F79FAA6"> shows up, the extension would use itself. Some scripting support would have to be added as well, but again, since only a few functions (like Player.controls.URL=X) are commonly used, emulation would be fairly straight forward. Unfortunately, the problem is that that clsid requests not a particular type of program but a specific binary ActiveX component. So in fact, handling it with anything else would be a violation of the HTML standard... Since when do extensions have to follow the standard? I can understand it not being shipped with a commercial browser, but if users want to do this with an extension, it seems to me like this is their perogative. More importantly, OSes (like Linux) that do not have a native implementation of ActiveX or WMP should not be limited by this fact. Standards are designed to keep doors open by making systems easier to use, not slam them shut just because you do not have a specific OS or software package present. |