donh said:
Hi,
This might be basic but could someone please point me in the right
direction on how to add a WMV movie to a web page.
Any advice on the best way of doing this, as well as any things to be
weary of would be greatly appreciated.
The most usual method today uses an ActiveX object with an embed path
within it for most browsers other than IE that do not support ActiveX
for the WMP without special third party plugins. However embed is
invalid code, and never has been part of W3C html. This method works on
most browsers, but gives many errors at the W3C validator. Most media
such as wmv, wma, rm, swf, etc can now be made to work with only valid
code, but you would never know this from looking at the code on sites
of some of the largest media companies.
However one can write a simple ordinary object for playing wmv that
works on most modern browsers and that uses only valid code. See the
code for
http://www.cwdjr.info/broadbandMedia/formatsOB/cancanWMV.php .
You can use the object for the player at any level from html 4.01
through xhtml 1.1. The object points to a simple .wvx redirector file
which points to the actual wmv file. If you need help with writing the
..wvx file, I can post an example of one. Note a very high bit rate wmv
for broadband is used here, so buffering might be very long on dialup.
You use a bit rate for the intended audience, and some sites uses up to
3 bit rate wmvs for dialup, low end broadband, and high end broadband.
On a special streaming server you often can encode the various bit
rates together and use code to select the correct bit rate for the
viewing browser. If you have only an ordinary html server, then you
would have to offer a link for each bit rate to be selected by the
user. Microsoft has a free Windows Media Encoder should you need to
make wmv files at various rates from a mpeg video capture of a video.
