[york28]

I have a website that I built using xhtml and CSS. The purpose of the site is to showcase various short movie clips. Right now I have them as mp4's and placed using an embed tag like such:

Code:
<embed src="../mp4/six.mp4" width="320" height="256" controller="true">

Ideally, I'd like them to play in either Windows Media 9 (which supposedly handles MP4) and Quicktime if available. Assuming that I did save them as the correct type of MP4 (Quicktime can do 3 different versions), will this allow that to happen?

I was going to use on of those twice-cooked <embed><object> methods, but they specify plug-in type, and I wanted to avoid that.

I have read that article at A List Apart about using standards-compliant flash, but it disabled streaming, and as such is not going to work for this purpose. But I did add a 1px by 1px MP$ to the first page like this:

Code:
<object classid="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B"
codebase="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab" height="1" width="1">
<param name="src" value="../mp4/fake.mp4">
<param name="autoplay" value="false">
<param name="controller" value="false">
<embed height="1" pluginspage="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/"
src="../mp4/fake.mp4" type="video/quicktime" width="1" controller="false"
autoplay="false"></object>

To try to get Windows IE to prompt users to download Quicktime.

So basically I'm looking for suggestions on how the best way to do this. I've decided that in this case I don't give a crap about standards, I just want it to work as much of the time as possible.

Thanks for the help.

And the site? 9 is coldest

(Sorry about the width.)

[Simon Mundy]

Originally posted by york28:
... stuff ...

Do you have access to server-side scripting?

[york28]

Yes. I can do PHP, Perl, pretty much anything.

[Simon Mundy]

Here's a quick link I found:

http://forums.3ivx.com/cgi-bin/ikonb...amp;topic=1210

[php]
<object height="300" width="480" data="http://site.com/clip.mp4" type="video/mp4"><a href="clip.mp4">click here to download the clip</a>
</object>
[/php]

That seems to be doing an OK job for the most part - unfortunately I don't have any mp4's that I can test this with (and time being another factor at the moment!)

Does this help?

The reason I asked about server-side scripting is that you could add extra params or classids to the OBJECT tag based on the 'MSIE' user-agent string to force IE/PC users to use the active-x plugin.

It may not be necessary!

Be keen to hear how you went.

[york28]

Well, I'm not sure yet. I like this solution better, first because it uses OBJECT instead of EMBED, and secondly because it fails to a link instead of a broken plugin image.

So far, I've changed the first movie only, called "bedtime story". If anyone here has a PC and want to let me know if it works or not, that'd be great. Here's a direct link to that page.

I'll post more tomorrow morning, when I get to check it out on my PC at work. I think my goal is to get this syntax to work, and then write a simple server-side check that pops up a warning to users that don't have the correct plugins installed.

(Update: On my old, old PC under IE 6 this worked. My friend with a new XP machine says it does nothing, he gets a blank page. So I guess the jury is still out on that. But the movies did play before for him in WMP, so I know that they are compatible, which was one of my worries. Quicktime is a little vague about the different types of MP4s that it can create.)

[york28]

On two of the PC's I've tried, without Quicktime or WMP installed, the EMBED tag works properly, and fails down to displaying the link. But on two others, one with QT and one with QT and WMP installed, an empty text field is displayed instead. This is for both your test sites and mine, which can be found at http://jimbdot.net/9/html/bedtime.shtml.

I am now becoming suspicious of the format of the MP4 files. But I have at least one report of my movie playing in WMP, so I'm not sure if it is an issue or not.

I'll try to make some files using the different output options in QT and post a link here, to see if that might fix the cross-platform problem.

[Simon Mundy]

Originally posted by york28:
On two of the PC's I've tried, without Quicktime or WMP installed, the EMBED tag works properly, and fails down to displaying the link. But on two others, one with QT and one with QT and WMP installed, an empty text field is displayed instead. This is for both your test sites and mine, which can be found at http://jimbdot.net/9/html/bedtime.shtml.

I am now becoming suspicious of the format of the MP4 files. But I have at least one report of my movie playing in WMP, so I'm not sure if it is an issue or not.

I'll try to make some files using the different output options in QT and post a link here, to see if that might fix the cross-platform problem.

UPDATE!

http://realdev1.realise.com/rossa/re...quicktime.html

Seems to work well for me