Using Java Applet to play WMV on Mac

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Imran Qureshi - 18 Dec 2005 18:37 GMT

I've read snippets here and there that you can embed a java applet into a
web page to play WMV files on the Mac. Does anyone know how to do this and
if it works?

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-imran

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Neil Smith [MVP Digital Media] - 18 Dec 2005 23:36 GMT

>I've read snippets here and there that you can embed a java applet into a
>web page to play WMV files on the Mac. Does anyone know how to do this and
>if it works?

I've not read those snippets (care to post a link ?)

But my thoughts would be no, that wouldn't work .They'd have to have
reverse-engineered the windows media wma and wmv codecs to do that,
which is hard and kind of pointless since the player already does that
job.

Perhaps you didn't mean java applets but some other technique (player
embedding and javascript perhaps ?)

Cheers - Neil

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Imran Qureshi - 19 Dec 2005 00:34 GMT

Windows Media Player installs a Java Applet according to the SDK.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/version64/plugin.aspx

however i can't find sample code to do it.

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-imran

>>I've read snippets here and there that you can embed a java applet into a
>>web page to play WMV files on the Mac. Does anyone know how to do this
[quoted text clipped - 12 lines]
>
> Cheers - Neil

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Neil Smith [MVP Digital Media] - 19 Dec 2005 09:49 GMT

>Windows Media Player installs a Java Applet according to the SDK.
>http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/version64/plugin.aspx
>
>however i can't find sample code to do it.

Well, that's very old and hardly used any more - the 'java applet'
part is misleading. Nobody** uses those browsers any more - everybody
using Netscape for example, is probably on NN7 or Mozilla (read the
footnote for that page).

Also, that plugin is for WMP6.4 which was last produced almost 7 years
ago - WMP is now up to version 10 (which is the default in XPSP2) and
comes with its own netscape plugins.

The download actually implements a java proxy interface to allow the
player to be scripted using javascript within a browser. Adding the
java applet on its own does nothing, because you also have to embed
the media player into the web page.

The applet is not a player on its own, just a series of hooks to allow
event handling and some degree of scripting. AFAIK it may possibly not
work on Mozilla (need to check). Documentation for this is on MSDN :

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/wmp6sdk/htm/win
dowsmediaplayerpluginfornetscapenavigator.asp

Cheers - Neil

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Mac Forum / Applications / Media Player / December 2005

Using Java Applet to play WMV on Mac