WMPlayer embed not playing video

Question

In my company we link our site to videos provided by a partner company. They changed their video encoding from .FLV to .MP4 videos and the current video player on our site doesn't playe them. We changed it to Windows Media Player given that most of our customers are running windows and internet explorer, the embed code we used is this one:

<object>
  <embed type="application/x-mplayer2" 
    pluginspage="http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/MediaPlayer/" 
    name="VideoPlayer" ShowStatusBar="false" 
    EnableContextMenu="false" autostart="true" 
    width="426" height="285" loop="false" 
    src=[video_url] />
</object>

I see the WMPlayer displayed on the site and the video plays, but my clients only see the player displayed and the video doesn't play. We updated our clients flash plugin and still nothing. What could be the problem?

Answer 1

You need to install additional codecs on the client machine. There are numerous codec packs for that (search google). You can't do it automatically from a browser either as it requires an installer to run.

WMP is a pretty crappy solution anyways since you're basically screwing over anyone who visits your site with a Mac or Linux computer. There are numerous other ways to play MP4 including via Flash but also using new HTML5 features.