I’m trying to play some free sample videos I found while serfing, but when I click on them I get "this is not a registered protocol
So WTF does that mean? Other than I don’t get to watch the clip.
First off, let me say I’m sorry about your indentured servitude.
Secondly, what type of file is the video? And what program are you using to run it?
Ha ha!
Mak fun of me speling, wil yu?
I have Windows XP with Quicktime, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, and WinTV 2000 all available to play videos. I do not know what type of file the video is. All it says is “click here for sample clip”. I’m not going to link to it because it wouldn’t be appropriate for these boards.
I don’t really care about the clips. I just want to know what a registered protocol is.
Basically, there are several different protocols to define how to transfer data between machines. Ones you might be familiar with are HTTP, FTP etc. The way a computer tells another computer what protocol it is going to send data in is to give it a URL with <protocol>://<address>. If you have software that can play that stream, then it registers with your browser that it is meant to handle that data and the data gets shunted off to that program to handle. If no program registers for that protocol, your browser doesn’t know how to interpret it.
Alright. That explains that. Thank you Shalmanese. 
Now my next question: If I don’t have the software to play a particular piece, how do I go about getting it? The site I was on doesn’t say.
Heh, nice.
pkbites, do a Google search of the protocol, or tell us what it is and maybe a doper will know. it’s the 1st part of the URL, as Shalmanese describes.
You get that alert from your browser when you click the link?
If so, I suspect it’s a malformed link. When it says “c is not a registered protocol”, I’m guessing the “c” is actually the first letter of a windows filesystem pathname (i.e., “c:\dir\file”.
If you can’t show us the link it’s going to be hard for anyone to figure out what’s wrong with it.