I am moving away from the idea of having a pop-up window with video in
it, so instead, I want them to save it directly to the hard drive.
Now, I do notice that sometimes certain browsers will ask bring up the
box DO YOU WANT TO OPEN or SAVE AS to the hard drive with radio
buttons beside each. I want this to automatically happen when the user
presses the link, so how do I go about this? Is this a windows thing
or a HTML thing? (I am trying to avoid the problem that I have
noticed sometimes when I click on a link for video, it will auto open
media player - which I do not want).
It is the choice of the user as to how he or she wishes to open videos
when a choice is offered on some browsers. I do not know of any method
for the writer of the page to directly override this choice, nor would
it be desirable if you could. You could suggest on the page that the
video be downloaded to the HD, if this is important for your page.
If you embed the video on the page using any dimensions for the size
desired, this will usually directly show the video on the page if the
browser has a player to support it. If not, the video just does not
show. If the viewer has no suitable browser to play the video, it would
be a waste of time to download a video unless a viewer wants to save it
for playing on another computer or they are willing to take the time to
download a player. Keep in mind that there are many video formats, and
not all players play all formats. You can even offer videos in 2 or 3
formats so that the viewer will be able to play it if they have at
least one of the more popular video players.
You will find some examples on my site at
http://www.cwdjr.info/media/playersRoot.php .
Go to the broadband link at the top of the page. You can see the code
by right clicking. Disregard the link labeled mime. The code used is
all W3C valid xhtml and does not use illegal tags such as embed. Some
of these videos stream(progressive download) at up to about 2 Mbps, so
if you do not have a broadband connection that will support over 2
Mbps, there will be a very long buffer time before playing starts. You
can encode some video formats, such as Windows .wmv or Real .rm, at
about 30 kbps to play on a good dialup connection, but the quality
leaves much to be desired. You could offer 3 choices for dialup,
low-end broadband, and high-end broadband. Those who have have much
video traffic usually have the videos stored on a special streaming
server(an ordinary html server will usually do for light video usage).
On a streaming server you can easily provide a multi-speed stream that
automatically selects the stream best suited for the viewing browser or
provides a clickon selection of speed.
