Windows Media Player and Firefox

I’m trying to figure out why videos on webpages that use WMP won’t play. The status bar for the video itself will say “Ready”, but when I click Play, it says “Opening media”, then “Connecting to media”, then back to “Ready” without playing. Meanwhile, the status bar for the browser says “Done”.

I have WMP installed on my computer. I have the WMP extension for Firefox installed too. Anyone know what setting I need to mess with to make it work? If you need more info, just ask.

Are you using the Media Player Connectivity extention?

No. I’ll try that now.

Got a little farther…now I can open the movie in WMP itself and watch it not play. I get a popup that says it cannot find the file. I’ve done everything it says to do in the WMP help box about that problem, to no avail.

I had a similiar problem when I upgraded Firefox to 1.5. This page took care of it for me.

I can’t change my default video plugin for Firefox, and I don’t have a listing for .wmv files. I can’t seem to add that either. Any ideas, anyone?

I added the ActiveX thing on that page, and now when I open a page with an embedded WMP video on it, WMP pops up and tells me it cannot find the file.

Technology be damned…

From the page I linked to earlier, did you try the Windows Media Player Plug-in for Netscape Navigator? (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download/plugin.aspx) IIRC, that’s what did the trick for me.

A related question: what causes WMP to “stutter” and re-buffer over and over again? I’ve messed with all the options that I can think of. Is it possible that the source (Astream) server is overloaded, or is my connection just not fast enough?

No, I didn’t, I removed Netscape from my computer a long time ago.

Back in the day when I used I.E., every video I found on the web would play for me. Some sites’ videos would stutter like that constantly, and some would never do it. I think it depends on the individual site.

I don’t use, or have, Netscape either. But I believe that Firefox is related in some way to Netscape, and that’s why that particular fix is located on the Mozilla/Firefox troubleshooting page that I linked to earlier. As I said, that’s what fixed my Firefox/WMP problem.