Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Browser support

The downside to embedding Windows Media is that you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get it to work on all browsers and platforms. Some solutions involve browser-sniffing and scripting—even Java applets—that are beyond the scope of this chapter.

Warning

As of this writing, the existing Windows Media Player plug-in for Macintosh does not support the very latest Windows Media codecs.

Most sites that provide embedded WM movies as of this writing use that old fallback, the embed element, to provide play parameters to the Windows Media Player plug-in. It’s not standards-compliant, and it will prevent your page from validating. You are encouraged to experiment with using the standard object element (or nested object elements) alone to see if it meets your needs.

The embed element is nested inside the object element as shown in this example:

    <object id="Player" height="280" width="320"
          classid="clsid:6BF52A52-394A-11d3-B153-00C04F79FAA6"
          type="application/x-oleobject"                 codebase="HTTP://ACTIVEX.MICROSOFT
.COM/ACTIVEX/CONTROLS/MPLAYER/EN/NSMP2INF.CAB#VERSION=6,4,7,1112">
       <param name="URL" value="movies/europe.wmv" />

        <embed type="application/x-mplayer2" name="MediaPlayer" width="320"
        height="280" src="movies/europe.wmv">
        <noembed><a href="streamingmovie.asx">See a streaming movie</a></noembed>
        </embed>

    </object>

Browsers that can use the ActiveX control will get their instructions from the object and param elements. Browsers that don’t understand the outer object element ...