Internet explorer & AVI files

[nickje]

Hi chaps!

Apologies for asking a question with my first post! I'll pop over to the welcome thread in a while

We seem to be having a problem where users go to open an AVI file using Internet Explorer 6 and it will only play the sound. Yet when the user downloads this file and then plays it locally both the video and the sound play fine. Has anyone experienced this before... and know of a fix?! All the machines are running windows xp pro and internet explorer 6. Thanks in advance!

[Teth]

and AVI file is just a container format. There can be a wide variety of video and sound codecs used to complress the video within.

When you say opne in ie do you mean clicking a link to http://wedbsite.web/filename.avi or do you mean a plugin based player which loads inside the browser.

Please clarify also when you download the file and open it is it being opened by windows media player, quicktime or some other player for example vlc, windvd,powerdvd or some other I haven't thought of?

[nickje]

Hi,

Thanks for the response. Yeah, the website contains a direct link to the AVI file (then asks if you wish to open or save etc). Certainly not a browser based player.

When the file is downloaded we open it in Windows Media Player and everything works hunky dory. It is WMP 10 if that makes any odds?

Thanks once again

[mac_shinobi]

Depends if wmp has the codecs it requires to playback streaming video, just a thought ( not sure how much this will help ) but if you download the avi file and install gspot then load the avi file into gspot and see what codecs the avi file requires ( If any ) post back and let us know

gspot can be gotten here :

http://www.headbands.com/gspot/

They have a mini faq etc there which will prolly help

[nickje]

Hi guys,

I'm still none the wiser on this one! I downloaded GSpot as recommended. That recognised that the file was encoded using an 'Indeo Video' codec. It also said that particular codec was installed on the machine. Does anyone have any other ideas? ops:

[mark]

So when the file is downloaded are you saying that it plays in a media player correctly, or still in IE?? - sorry If I misread, I'm just not clear on that.

Maybe it's an incorrect codec for IE. Can you install a codec pack to check?

[nickje]

Yeah, I have downloaded the file to the local hard drive and it plays using windows media player without any problems. Yet whenever you try to play the file from anywhere but the local hard drive (through our intranet or browsing to the server we keep them on) then it only plays the sound. After some quick research we've found that Microsoft didn't include support for this particular codec in SP2 - can anyone confirm this?

thanks

[Teth]

I think we might need a copy of the file to diagnose this any furthur.

Media Player in the browser has access to any codecs that media player on the local machine has. They are essentially the same thing. So it might be a badly encoded file, the only other alternative explanations I can think of get into pie in the sky theory territory. Group policy blocking a specific activex control or a certificate signing issue or something that causes the activex plugin version of IE to behave differently to the exe version.