User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 (X11/20051013)
I use a combination of EMBED and SMIL (without the OBJECT)
generated on the fly to end up with a programmable/positionable
media stream playable by QT from Firefox, IE, and Safari on
OSX (Firefox and Safari) and Windows (Firefox and IE).
Purpose of programmable/positionable is to allow the user
to click anywhere in a transcript and to have the media player
crank up from the start of the clicked-on paragraph (controlled
via timecodes worked into the php/html).
Firefox works great (OSX & Win) and I can embed the media player
in a top frame positioned over the place in the transcript where
the media player starts. Neither IE nor Safari can handle that
level of multi-tasking without breaking the text display in the
lower frame and hence I have to go to a plain HTML page w/o the
transcript text when routing to those browsers.
Finally, OSX in general cannot playback the mp4 movie in QT as
easily as QT running on Windows can. My datapoint is QT on
Win2k on 450 laptop plays video smoothly (802.11a), same
QT/video on 1ghz emac has some jerkiness to it (wired to network).
My code is not intuitive because I use javascript to dynamically
setup the EMBED because I was trying to delay the startup of QT
so the frames might work fine in Safari on OSX, or Firefox would
work w/ frames on Panther.
Roughly ... javascript ...
function loadMediaPlayer(baseMediaWidth, mediaEmbedHeight, tmpMediaReference) {
var mediaDiv = document.getElementById('media_div');
var node;
setBrowserAndOS();
if (OS == 'Windows' || OS == 'OSX') {
node = document.createElement("EMBED");
node.setAttribute('SRC', "/empty.mov");
node.setAttribute('WIDTH', baseMediaWidth);
node.setAttribute('HEIGHT', mediaEmbedHeight);
node.setAttribute('QTSRC', tmpMediaReference + '.smil');
node.setAttribute('PLUGINSPAGE','http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/');
} else {
// pass back SMIL reference w/o QuickTime force via empty.mov; probably won't work
node = document.createElement("EMBED");
node.setAttribute('SRC', tmpMediaReference + '.smil');
node.setAttribute('WIDTH', baseMediaWidth);
node.setAttribute('HEIGHT', mediaEmbedHeight);
}
mediaDiv.appendChild(node);
}
PHP used to pick up the above javascript function:
echo("<body class='media_frame'
onload=\"loadMediaPlayer($baseMediaWidth, $mediaEmbedHeight,
'$tmpMediaReference');\">\n"); ((all on one line))
I should add--it only seems to be Firefox 1.5 for windows--on the Mac
(which I just checked) it worked fine.
----------------------------------------
Gray T. Miller
Telecast Operations Technician
email@hidden
(608) 663-1961
"Gray Miller" <email@hidden> 12/29 12:51 PM >>>
I have what seems to be a pretty weird error, and while I've searched
online, I can't seem to find any solution.
I've been getting our small DSS and media online, and had one
particular segment, http://www.mmsd.org/mmsdtv/streamingBOE.htm ,
working fine. In fact, if you look at it in Explorer (on PC), it's
STILL
working fine, ditto with Safari. (ok, I'm a little bothered with the
audio/video not being in sync, but the goal was to get chapters
working,
and that works fine).
But in Firefox, it doesn't work. Moreover, I've found other sites
where
the video has stopped working when it's a reference movie (
Soundstream,
for example). Has anyone else noticed this? My embed code is as
follows:
