Embedding Windows Media Player for all browsers

Edit: This question was written in 2008, which was like 3 internet ages ago. If this question is still relevant to your environment, please accept my condolences. Everyone else should convert into a format supported by your browsers (That would be H.264 if Internet Explorer is needed, and probably AV1, VP8/VP9 if not) and use the <video> element.

We are using WMV videos on an internal site, and we are embedding them into web sites. This works quite well on Internet Explorer, but not on Firefox. I've found ways to make it work in Firefox, but then it stops working in Internet Explorer.

We do not want to use Silverlight just yet, especially since we cannot be sure that all clients will be running Windows XP with Windows Media Player installed.

Is there some sort of Universal Code that embeds WMP into both Internet Explorer and Firefox, or do we need to implement some user-agent-detection and deliver different HTML for different browsers?

Solution 1:

The following works for me in Firefox and Internet Explorer:

<object id="mediaplayer" classid="clsid:22d6f312-b0f6-11d0-94ab-0080c74c7e95" codebase="http://activex.microsoft.com/activex/controls/mplayer/en/nsmp2inf.cab#version=5,1,52,701" standby="loading microsoft windows media player components..." type="application/x-oleobject" width="320" height="310">
<param name="filename" value="./test.wmv">
     <param name="animationatstart" value="true">
     <param name="transparentatstart" value="true">
     <param name="autostart" value="true">
     <param name="showcontrols" value="true">
     <param name="ShowStatusBar" value="true">
     <param name="windowlessvideo" value="true">
     <embed src="./test.wmv" autostart="true" showcontrols="true" showstatusbar="1" bgcolor="white" width="320" height="310">
</object>

Solution 2:

May I suggest the jQuery Media Plugin? Provides embed code for all kinds of video, not just WMV and does browser detection, keeping all that messy switch/case statements out of your templates.