After much fun with Google, I think I've enlightened myself.
From what I understand, the reason Apple (and many other plug in
producers) released the javascript 'code injection' instructions was
to fix the issue introduced with an Internet Explorer update, released
by MS as a result of the Microsoft vs Eolas case. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EOLAS
With a fairly recent version of IE 7, the behaviour observed when
using the html object tag is not as bad as I observed in IE 6 earlier
today. In IE 6, I was presented with a white, blank space where the
video was supposed to play using the qt plugin.
Viewing the same page in IE 7 resulted in a QuickTime logo and text
along the lines of 'press space bar or enter to activate and use this
control'. Doing so resulted in a working QT video - this isn't too bad
as, generally, there will only be one or two embedded videos per page.
Lastly, I think all of this is moot, as I read on an msdn blog that
the April 2008 update to Internet Explorer will include a workaround,
which will enable the 'old style' method of using the 'object' tag
hard-coded into the html. No more 'click this to continue, press space
bar for that' messages.
I think I'll go back to using the plain old hard-coded html method for
now and see what happens.
Sorry if all of what I've said is old news, hopefully it will be of
use to someone searching the archives in the future!
After eventually getting my head around the Javascript method of
embedding a QuickTime movie, I have come up against a brick wall,
which I can't seem to get over.
I have a page at https://secure.houseschools.com/stu/test.html that
is supposed to load a poster movie and, when clicked, open a
connection to an on demand stream over rtsp.
It works in FireFox on PC and Mac, Internet Explorer on PC, but I
can't get it to work in Safari on the Mac.
Well, it works if you click on the play button, but I specifically
have the 'autoplay' set to 'true'. Here's the entire html page:
