A stupid programming problem with a media player.

Tim-K

Okay, here's the problem. If you've read my signature at the bottom of each of my posts, you know that I've got my own webshow on the internet. And displaying the shows has become a problem.

I'm redesigning the Webshow page. The old one currently in use uses nested framesets, whereas the new one is all nested tables. The actual coding of how to display each show has not changed at all, it's just the switch from frames to tables.

The original page (on the site now) requires me to RIGHT click and select "open in new window" to see a show in WMP, otherwise, if you just left click, it pops open that annoying small Internet Explorer window on the left side of the screen to play the shows. I don't like and never use that left side window.

The shows are coded as .WMV files, straight from Windows Movie Maker 2.0 . I never had an .mpg file pull this BS on me.

But the new page is worse about which way it opens the shows. It still usually works on the same left / right click idea as before, but it's much more random now. Sometimes, right clicking open a show opens BOTH windows at slightly different times! Opening a file again and again can have totally different results than the last time it was opened!

Needless to say, this is not acceptable. I can't release this version of the screen until it's fixed.

What's going on here, and how can I fix it? I want the shows to open in their own big (bigger) WMP screen in the middle of the monitor all the time.

My computer runs on XP Home, and has never done this before.

Spinner

It's probably a combination of getting your file associations to lock and your possible 'open target' settings on your website. You may want to try removing all associations from anyother media player except WMP to IE (even though that shouldn't really be a problem if you're using .WMV files), and make sure they don't start tugging on the rope again, if you know what I mean. Then perhaps manually check through your file type associations (folder options), and make sure they are hunky dory, and you could also try disabling the 'play videos in web pages' option in IE's 'internet options'.

Some of that might not be entirely relevant but it's all related to the same problem. All this added functionality Microsoft has added to IE and WMP9 can sometimes start to run loose. You may find once you reigned it in a bit (by doing some of the above), it might start behaving the way you want it to.

Cheers

Tim-K

I disabled the "play video in web page" option, but it still does it. I should mention that when it does try to open 2 windows at once like that, the background goes to white instead of the web page.

Any other ideas?

Spinner

Hmm. I think that probably it's going to have to be a case of you doing a bit more code work on the video links. Sometimes having, standard, what I would call 'loose code', for video links etc etc, can run havoc on certain systems. You want your website to have very specific commands in place for when a link is clicked on. e.g You click on a vid link and it does exactly what it does when you right click and click 'save target file as' instead of trying to open it in a media player or whatever. That's just an example, but I think the problem will be more easily cured if you work with the sites code for a fix instead of your OS or IE.

The underlying logic for that thought is simple because the problem only started after you had updated your sites design. I'm no coding ace, so unfortunately I can't offer you any fancy pieces of code to help you out, but I suggest you do a search for some web coding based web sites, which may have just the sort of code help you are looking for. It also might be worth shooting some of Short-Media's resident coders a PM and see if they can offer you some more advice, as like I said, I think the problem can be more easily and universal corrected by polishing the sites code a bit.

Sorry I can't be of more help. Let us know how you get on.

SPINNER

p.s (Sorry about the delay in replying)

Tim-K

The only thing I can think of that might make a difference is to rewrite the page to use nested framesets instead of tables. It makes no sense to me why this would change anything, but it works on the original page.