Windows Media Player VS Real Player

[Baja]

I have produced 2 videos using Windows Media Player for distribution on my CD. My question is that if the end user has both Real Player & Windows media player installed, the action will return a "No applications associated with this type media" warning box will appear. I know that the end user has Windows Media Player installed because it performs a registry check and allows the user the option to install it. But since the end user has the Real Player set as "Default" this warning will appear?????? And my video won't play.... Any advice?

[bnagel]

We have seen this as well. Very troublesome for many users! Is it possible to patch this behavior, or is it a Microsoft issue?

[Adam]

One good solution is to simply perform an execute program action on the MediaPlayer executable and pass the file to it as a command line argument. If you search these forums there are plenty of examples of this. You will be happy to know that AutoPlay Media Studio 4.0 (due for release in the next month) has the ability to embed the Windows Media Player directly into your menu.

[bnagel]

Thanks for your reply, Adam.

I have two follow-up questions (we haven't done a lot of video on CD, yet, so I apologize if these are naive):

1) You suggested performing an execute program action on the MediaPlayer executable. From the other posts I've looked at, it looks like people are actually distributing the mplayer2.exe executable on their CDs (using calls like %SrcDrv%\mplayer2.exe). Is this what you are suggesting? Will this work on an older platform like Win95?

2) Once the media player is embeded (in version 4.0), will we need to worry about codecs? Will it play on Win95 and up?

Thanks again.

[Adam]

1) You said in your earlier post that you check the users system to make sure that they have media player installed. In that case you could include the executable (Make sure that you are aware of MS licensing agreement), or you could simply try and call it from the default directory that WMP gets installed to. If you really wanted to you could also do a file search action to find the path to the WMP executable.

2) Basically as long as the user has that codec installed on their system then it will run on any windows system. There is a set of standard codecs that were shipped with Windows 95 and up:

Intel Indeo (IR31 or IR32)
Supermatch Cinepak
Microsoft RLE (MS-RLE)
Microsoft Video 1 (MS-CRAM)

You could also search the registry to make sure that the user has the codec that you are using.