In this thread I described at tedious length my efforts to get JW FLV player work around its apparently incomplete comprehension of dots and slashes. Eventually my pages with their "lightbox" popups with Flashy MP4 files all worked -- on three computers, in Konqueror, Epiphany, Opera, Safari, Kmeleon and even (under WinVista) MSIE.

So I burned a CD of the whole caboodle and took it to my boss, who normally uses an institutional-issue Win XP computer with MSIE and only MSIE. (Software installation is forbidden and apparently impossible.)

The video wouldn't start. No error message (no talk of anything being nonexistent or denied, nothing about missing codecs); just stylized spokes going round and around, as if waiting for the video to come in over a very slow connection.

In Explorer (and I don't mean Internet Explorer), she clicked on the MP4 files. They played just fine.

We took the CD to another man's institutional-issue computer. It looks identical to hers, but for reasons unknown it somehow also has Firefox installed. He tried with Firefox and got the same spokes-going-round effect. Then he tried with MSIE: it worked just fine.

In three little letters, WtF?

I suspect that middle-aged corporate computers don't like MP4. (Both these computers happily play Youtube stuff, which I believe is usually FLV.) How's my hunch? I don't know of an MP4 to FLV converter that's free of charge or cheap. Whether it works or not, MOV is impossibly bulky. Would AVI be safer?

Grrr.

Including the HTML document and the Flash player?


Did the Flash player start? Otherwise I'd suspect http://www.phdcc.com/xpsp2.htm but MSIE's security settings are a mess.


AFAIK it shouldn't matter, if the computer contains a program that can open MP4 files (and if no program is associated with a file extension Windows usually asks you what to do). But in this case I gather it's the Flash player that opens the MP4 file? Wonder if some other Flash player would work better?

Yes, and the Javascript and so forth.


Yes, the Flash player started, with branded (for a few seconds) console and rotating spoke animation close to (or simply ripped off from) what you see while OS X is starting up. Yes, there was also some of Win's usual whinnying (phdcc.com/xpsp2.htm) about the dangers of "ActiveX" (whatever "ActiveX" means): we just clicked the option(s) that meant "no I'm not worried, so go ahead".



Me too. Any recommendations among Flash players?

No idea, but there seems to be a support forum: http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/forum/bug_reports

I learn that there's MP4 and there's MP4. I'm guessing that the MP4 I tried to use was too newfangled for XP, though gods know how it could run within MSIE in one computer and not within Firefox in the same computer (even though the selfsame Firefox is happy to run FLV files via SWF).

Anyway, the files are now in FLV format, thanks to Handbrake, and all is working well, even if I have aged more than expected in the last few days.

I dont know much about mp this and mp that, but I doubt it had to do with the OS. Rather installed players, plugins, codecs, whatever those things need...

Nothing to do with the OS inherently, I'm sure. The idea that Win XP is incapable of displaying such-and-such a video file is most implausible and furthermore it's straightforwardly refuted when we see the very same example of Win XP happily displaying the very same file when it's clicked on within [not-Internet] Explorer. So my title was a little facetious.

The problem rephrased: These are institutional computers, with bog-standard Micro$oftware, which thanks to institutional timidity have probably been altered by little other than the "Service Packs" and "security updates" that have come out since XP was new. But whether the timidity is institutional or personal, or whether it's perhaps just a matter of sloth or lack of interest, the software on a lot of computers remains much as it was when the computer first came out of its box. If browsers running under XP on these particular computers couldn't show the MP4 files, I guessed that millions of other people's browsers also wouldn't be able to do so.

(My Kubuntu/gnash machine likes most FLV files but doesn't like these particular files, or for some other reason doesn't show them at all. I tell myself that Kubuntu is less important than Windows or OS X and that gnash is less important than Flash.)

Usability considerations prescribe subtitles. Well, uh, sorry. (I await a thunderbolt from Jakob Nielsen.)