Does this video play OK?

Hiya,

in my web page I have a link to a trailer here:

http://www.greyaliengames.com/games.php#absoluteblue

see where it says Watch a trailer!

Thing is, if I click it, it spends a few minutes loading it, then displays a blank screen with a funny icon in the corner (presumably because it can't play it). Yet if I right click and do save target as, and run it from my desktop, media player has no problems playing it. Why the hell doesn't the media player plug in play it then?

How does it work on your PC?

Thanks in advance for any feedback :-)

Most likely your web hosting company does not supply the correct MIME-type for the file extension. Webbrowsers (and their plugins) don't launch embedded content based on the file extension, but on the MIME-type.

When you right click & save, then you launch it through your OS which *does* use the file extension exclusively.

I tried using "Open URL" option in WMP at first - it seemed to be downloading the entire file before it started to play it, which was odd?? WMP doesn't usually do that.

It works, but:

A) I'm using Firefox which downloads MPGs before it plays them anyway
B) its a stupidly big file for a 47s clip at that resolution.

What's it compressed with (if anything)?

xlsior: well I never knew about that mime type stuff.

GfK: don't know what it's compressed with, it's on the publisher's web site. They do have low quality 12MB version but there isn't much different in size.

On my PC it does download the whole thing when I click on it, then it just doesn't play. I might change the link to put "(right click and click Save Target As and save to desktop)" or similar after it, of course those are IE only instructions, might have to checkout Firefox for some more instructions.

Most likely, you can just ask your hosting provider to add the mime-type for your file to their server settings.

If it's a WMV file, the correct mime-type would be video/x-ms-wmv

For a list of some others, see: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/288102

From that page: "Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) types allow for the exchange of different kinds of files on the Internet. For Microsoft Windows Media files and live broadcasts to stream properly, both Web browsers and servers must have their MIME types configured to recognize Windows Media file types. Although browsers usually have their MIME types set automatically, in some cases you may have to set them manually. MIME types almost always have to be configured manually on a Web server. "

well I'm not hosting it as I'm an affilate for the game developers. I'll contact them about this... thanks.

Wow, sweet! yeah it works here.

I hear more fruityloops default sounds :)

That game looks bloomin great!

so it plays in your browser then? What broser have you got and what plug in launches to play it, or did you just download it?

Yeah it is a neat game :-)

Oh, sorry, yeah, it downloaded it 100% before launching it in MediaPlayer Lite.

weird, I have mediaplayer installed but the video never ran!

Just black. Downloaded it and used Winamp.

However it runs fine in Media Player.

Is this Blitz3d or Max? Not too original but it looks pretty cool!

You should link it to a new page which has embedded object or something similar which shows the video

thanks for the replies.

Just gotta clear this up, this isn't my game, I'm an affiliate for it (well it's on my website), I just wasn't having 100% sucess with the video. Anyway the game is good, up my street anyway :-)