I noticed recently when testing browsing my site with Mozilla Firefox (v1.5-2.x.x.1) that the pop up window that embedded my WMV videos (yeah, I should probably find a better, more cross compatible video codec) linked and presented using Marcus' WordPress VideoPop Plugin would no longer display Microsoft MediaPlayer's controls (pause, seek, volume, etc.) in the pop up window. Also the WMV's would not stream; the files needed to be downloaded in their entirety before they would begin to play. This, of course is not good when some are 50MB+ in size. Essentially, the video pop up window would appear blank, with its caption, and then just seem to sit there. This was happening with v.9, v.10, and v.11 of MediaPlayer — for both Mac and Windows PCs. At this point, most visitors would probably just abandoned viewing the video.

After doing some research, I found something to correct this behavior. Unfortunately, the correction lies in the hands of the end-user, not in the plugin itself. I didn't trace the code too much, so I don't know what is truly at fault. I hope this helps some other Firefox VideoPop users out there. The following install will allow the MS MediaPlayer ActiveX control to be called and instantiated via Firefox:

http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/plugin.htm#download

File name: npmozax.dll

Who knows, this might have been fixed by the Mozilla crew by now. This post is quite old and has been sitting in draft mode. I just decided to post it now. If nothing else, drop a comment and let me know if any of you ever saw similar behavior and how you corrected it…

This entry was posted on May 20, 2007 7:19 pm by The Kid and is filed under Ramblings, Internet, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.