Lee Kelleher’s Weblog

I hate to admit it, but I’m stuck… I’m trying to figure out how to best embed a WMV video clip in a web-page, so that it works cross-browser (and cross-platform).

Even after all my years of web-development, I’m still confused to which browser supports which tag … nested <embed> tags in <object> tags … it gets messy!

I’m as equally confused with the Class ID attribute: “CLSID:6BF52A52-394A-11d3-B153-00C04F79FAA6” – surely that can’t be the same across all browsers/platforms?!

A List Apart article discusses dropping the <embed> tag. Which sounds like a good idea to me. The HTML looks so much better… MIME types all the way baby!!

<object type="video/x-ms-wmv" data="/media/video.wmv" width="320" height="260">
	<param name="src" value="/media/video.wmv" />
	<param name="autostart" value="0" />
	<param name="controller" value="1" />
</object>

I tested this on Firefox 2.0 and IE7 on Vista, and IE6 and Safari on XP – all fine, so far so good! When I ask my client to test the page on their Mac … it’s no good! The videos just wouldn’t load! Hmphf!

So does anyone know of a simple way of embedding a WMV video clip that works cross-browser/platform? Please let me know, I’d be very a happy developer!

Otherwise, I’m so close to using the beastly code that comes from the “Embedded Media HTML Generator” … help me please!

I used all sorts of add-ons and extensions for Firefox, (I’ll get around to writing a blog post on that soon too). Since I do a lot of web-development, I switch between Firefox and Internet Explorer frequently during a build.

To make this easier, I’ve been using Grayson Mixon’s IE View Lite. But with the latest upgrade (version 1.3.2), it broke in Firefox 2.0! (This made me sad)

I’d been holding out for the next upgrade – to see if that would fix the problem… but nothing came.

So I emailed Grayson to see if there was a potential fix in a future release; which he promptly replied:

IE View Lite 1.3.2 and 1.3.3 are Firefox 3 only. If you want to continue using Firefox 2, you should use IE View Lite 1.3.1, the only difference being compatibility updates for Firefox 3 that broke backward compatibility.

I’ve now uninstalled version 1.3.2 – reverting back to 1.3.1 – and everything is good again! (Thanks Grayson).

It does concern me that support was dropped for Firefox 2.0 in favour of version 3 (which is still only in beta) – cutting out a large proportion of the user-base. But I guess once Firefox 3 has shipped, no one will be bothered anyway.