I have a friend (really is a friend, not me) that’s trying to upload a movie onto an html page.
He’s publishing with a Mac. The movie needs to be played using QuickTime. Currently, on Windows machines the movie opens with RealPlayer and there’s audio but no video. Also, when you right click on the movie, “Play Using” or “Open With” are not available options.
Basically, I need a piece of HTML code that he can put in there that will force any system to use QuickTime. Possibly with a link to a QuickTime download site.
Can’t be done. The choice of which media player to use is up to the person’s browser settings. You’ll need to configure the Windows browser to use Quicktime instead of RealPlayer, but there’s no way to force anyone else using the page to do that.
Friedo is right. I can tell my computer to use whatever I want to open files with a given extension. So if you’re creating QuickTime movies (maybe as *.qt files), I can tell my computer to open those with RealPlayer (does that spyware-infested piece of crap play Quicktime too?) and there’s nothing you can do about it.
When a site says “you need Quicktime to play this” what they’re really saying is “this is a Quicktime file”, but there may be other media players you can use to play it.
There’s nothing you can do in HTML or Javascript to force something to open with a certain application. Yikes, that would be dangerous. Here’s a file on my website named “innocent.doc”, but when you click it a script forces your computer to open/run it with cmd.exe. Actually, it wouldn’t really surprise me that much if IE does give you this ability.
Do you actually have QuickTime installed on the Windows computer you’re testing on? If you do, then somewhere in the options it should give you the ability to associate all .qt files with QuickTime instead of RealPlayer. Then, if I were you, I’d uninstall RealPlayer altogether.
Yes, but that’s not really the issue. MY computer is not a big deal - I’ve seen the movie in question.
What I really need is a work around for John or Jane Q. Dumbass who opens a page and has no idea how to adjust browser settings. Currently, on windows systems the film automatically starts playing using RealPlayer.
I guess I just want to stop the film from automatically loading, and have the little quicktime blurby show at the top of the page. That would be awesome. Then, I assume if a person downloads quicktime there’s a way to make the film start playing.
Well, not on all Windows systems, though. That’s what I’m trying to say. It just does this on your system because you’ve (inadvertently or on purpose) configured Windows to open that type of file with RealPlayer automatically. If you want, I can tell you how to change this. But other people might have done something different on their machines. For example, it wouldn’t open in RealPlayer on my machine, because I don’t have it installed. If it’s a QuickTime file, it would open in QuickTime.
I can’t think of any way, as a website designer, you can tell the client machine what application to use to open a file. I may stand to be corrected on this, given IE’s susceptibility to let anybody tell it to do anything.
Well, that you can probably do by using a MIME type header like “application/octet stream” or something. The client machine won’t know what application to use to open the file and will prompt the user to save the file or specify an application to open it with. But they will still get to choose what to open it with, and may choose RealPlayer if they desire (although you could instruct them to play it with QuickTime if they have it installed). That might be your workaround. Just say on your page “Warning: this QuickTime file doesn’t work in RealPlayer, please open it with QuickTime, and here’s the link where you can download QuickTime”.
Windows uses file extensions to identify file types, and therefore to pick the correct application with which to open the file. If fifteen different computers are trying to use Real Player to open a Quicktime file, then there are exactly two possibilities:
[ol]
[li]Each of the fifteen computers has been configured to have Real Player be the default application for “.qt” files (or whichever extension your friend is using)[/li][li]The file in question has the wrong file extension (e.g., it is called “movie.rm” instead of “movie.qt”)[/li][/ol]
As several others have stated, the choice of which application is used to open a particular file type is made on each computer, and cannot be forced upon one by the web site. The best you can do is inform the viewer that this is a Quicktime file, and that they need Quicktime to view it.
I suspect that the problem goes a little deeper than this… Not only does the file need to have the right extension for the user’s computer to know what to do with it, but it also has to be in the right format to begin with. If the format of the file is RealMedia, then changing the extension to .qt or .mov won’t help, since the format isn’t changed. In fact, it’d make the situation worse: Not only will the movie still not open correctly in Quicktime (it’ll try, but Quicktime will say something like “Unsupported format”), it also won’t even try to open it in RealPlayer, where it would have worked.
If the movie file is, in fact, a RealMedia file (and not, say, a MPEG with RealPlayer set as the default for MPEG files), then you have to either accept that it’ll only play in RealPlayer, or you’ll have to somehow convert the file. And that, in turn, is a huge headache: I’m not sure there’s any free method to convert RealMedia movies to something usable like MPEG or Quicktime.
What is the extension of the movie file? If it’s .mpg, then you’re probably fine, since everyone has something or another which can open .mpg files (though you, the webmaster, have no control over what that something-or-other will be). If it’s .rm, though, you’re in trouble.
Any time you go to a web site to download a file, a Windows PC will attempt to open that file (as it downloads) in the application that uses it. So if you download a Word .doc file, your browser will download the file and Word will attempt to open it with no intervention on your part. Savvy web users know how to prevent this, but one should not assume this to be the case the vast majority of the time.
If you want a web user to download a file before it can be used, your best bet is to zip the file first. That way, a Windows PC will download the zipped file, but the human operating the computer will be required to open that zipped file and manually use it.
I know that IE has a preference for believing the file’s extension instead of the MIME header for what to open it with, but does it completely ignore the header?
And other browsers in Windows, such as Firefox and Opera, look first at the MIME header, and if that’s not known, it uses the file name extension.
alice, it might help if you show us the HTML code that offers the file, and any details on how the web server is set up. People have been trying to answer your question, but have been having to make a lot of assumptions.
In that case, RealPlayer won’t be used to view the movie on any of my systems, because I don’t have it installed, nor do most John or Jane Q. Dumbass. On their systems, these files will open with Windows Media Player.
And by the way, what’s wrong with their using WMP to view mpg or avi files?
If this guy is using a Mac he must be a smart cookie. This is reinforced by the fact that he actually created a movie. So I’d have him look into converting into FLV and embedding it within a Flash file. This is a pretty basic conversion that FFMPEG, free software, does right out of the box. It’s what sites like YouTube play to automatically stream the movie without needing to download and playing on a wide variety of systems and browsers without needing to download plugins.
Flash is installed in damn near 100% of browsers. Quicktime? No idea, but I’d be surprised if it’s on 70% of PCs. It may save you some headaches doing it this way (but then introduce a couple more headaches… welcome to web design).
Ah - this is EXACTLY what sort of help I need. Any idea how you do this? That is convert it to FVL and embed it in a flash file? Like, step by step instructions? Where do I get FFMPEG free soft ware? What are the steps?