Windows Media isn’t completely broken, but I’ve messed up a setting so the samples from Amazon’s CD listings don’t play.
I’m in Windows XP with Firefox 1.0.4 and Media Player v.9. I had been getting popups every time I tried listening to a clip, asking if I wanted to let WM be a server (I think), so I told it “No”, and checked the “Don’t ask again” box. (Yes, that was dumb to do both at once.) Now I click to hear a sample, Firefox goes to a blank page called “hurl.exe” and WM starts up. It says “Connecting to media…”, then “Attempting to reconnect…”, and pops up an error. Looking for more info gets a page “0xC00D11C0: Cannot play the file” (I had noticed that!) with (among lots of irrelevant possibilities) stuff about protocols (all enabled) and proxy servers (not here, AFAIK). The Web-help link says “We’re working on it.” I’ve looked at all the settings I can find in WM, and went to the firewall settings as suggested in the sticky, but nothing seems to help.
Has anybody got a fix short of removing and re-installing WM?
Open your firewall and change the settings under Program Control for WMP from “disallow” to “allow” or “ask” for both categories (access and server). From your description of the message about allowing WMP to act as a server, you are using ZoneAlarm, yes? That was a message from your firewall, not WMP.
No, no ZA here. I’ve used it before, but this has XP and I never got around to it. I’ll disable the Windows one and install ZA, probably tomorrow morning. I might be back.
Hmm. Something is strange. The firewall included with XP does not, to my my knowledge, monitor outboud traffic and doesn’t care about programs trying to access the internet or act as servers. It only blocks unwanted inbound traffic. Zonealarm (and some others), DO monitor outbound traffic and control program access to the internet, and it behaves exactly as you describe. I’ll be interested in hearing how it goes with running ZA. It’ll be better for you int he long run. ZA is vastly superior in every way to the XP firewall.