WMV won't play from CD-ROM on a Mac

windows media problems on cd-rom

[frankandopen]

Hi,

This is an urgent post and it's my first time to this forum. Help! I am developing a website for use on a CD - using high quality .wmvs. (Don't ask!) It's working fine as a website - i.e. over a network or online - the embedded videos play perfectly. Yet when I burn a CD, the embedded files stop working on the Mac only. The videos reside in the smae folder as the html page. This is how the code looks:

<object id="MediaPlayer2"
width="480" height="424"
classid="CLSID:6BF52A52-394A-11d3-B153-00C04F79FAA6"
type="application/x-oleobject">
<param name="URL" value="Video_T21.wmv">
<param name="autoStart" value="false" />
<param name="animationatStart" value="true" />
<param name="transparentatStart" value="false" />
<param name="autoStart" value="true" />
<param name="showControls" value="true" />
</object>

Can anyone help?! Deadline is yesterday...

[bcolflesh]

type="application/x-oleobject"

There is no ActiveX on the MAC platform - MS recommends a simple link to the content:

[go.microsoft.com...]

[whoisgregg]

Mac users can't be relied upon to have a WMV playing application installed, perhaps Flash video would be more appropriate for a cross-platform CD distro?

[lZakl]

^^ I agree, as there are some "Mac Zealots" whom will not install any Microsoft product on their Apple. Trust me, I know quite a few.

-- Zak

[whoisgregg]

"Mac Zealots"

From the viewpoint of a person distributing rich media on a CD, the motivations of the users for choosing one application over another is hardly worth considering. It's sometimes easy to forget there are zealots on every side. And, in the end, the zealots are not to be fretted over, it's the middle ground of practical users and their choices that matters.

For every Mac user who hasn't installed a WMV playing application, there's probably ten PC users who haven't installed Quicktime. There just isn't the kind of cross-platform saturation for either product -- for whatever reason. My advice? If you have the room, include files for both. Otherwise, don't use either.

And that was my only point, that the technical concern of coding the <object> for a WMV file on a mac is only half the problem of getting the file to play at all.

[frankandopen]

Thanks everyone for posting. Unfortunately, hundreds of videos have been encoded as .wma and I can't change it or start again... As the vast majority of our users are using PCs - it's a fairly strict user group, we are recommending the PC. For a Mac User, we are giving them the option of copying the folder from the CD-rom to the desktop and playing from there - this seems to work fine - not sure whether it is the read-only nature of the CD-Rom - that maybe Windows Media player tries to write some information to a temp file that doesn't exist on the Mac. Anyways, sorry Mac users. At least an option is provided though. Windows Media for Mac is a complete no-no...

[bcolflesh]

not sure whether it is the read-only nature of the CD-Rom

See my second post, Mac can't run the command you've used to play the media.