I have this really annoying problem (well, one of them) where I have a
variety of media files - mov, avi, wmv that I manage on a clients
website. The files vary in size from 1MB to 16MB.

(Using IE6 or Firefox) When I click on the wmv videos they do not start
playback until the entire video has downloaded and while the video is
downloading the pop-up window is blank - no UI visible...which makes
the website look a bit ugly.

I have noticed that the Bit Rate on the wmv files is between 1,000kpbs
and 5,500kpbs.

So, my questions are:

1) Is this an abnormally high bit rate for a wmv designed for the web?
2) Can it effect the time it takes to start playback while downloading?
3) Is there a object setting for WMV that allows the clip to start
playing before it has finished downloading? (I'm using a mime-type of
"video/x-ms-wmv")

Thanks for any help anyone can provide!

Troy.

Troy wrote:

I believe that you need an embedded Asx object to have the media player
launched. Look about the web and I'm sure you will find media player
plug-ins for web developers.

You might also consider going over to the flash video format. This gets
rid of 99 percent of concerns whether someones computer can display the
video in question.


Yeah, that seems pretty darn fast. Around 700 is the usual bitrate
target for broadband connections.

RS wrote:
Thanks for your reply. I'm going to get them to bring down the bit
rate/data rate and see what sort of an impact that has on our download
and start-to-play times.

Troy wrote:
You can find tons of apps and scripts for embedding video players into
web sites. A good place to start is www.hotscripts.com. They have a huge
collection of scripts cataloged for just about anything you need. Asp,
Php, Cgi, ect.

Sorry about the late reply....but thanks, I'll check-out the website!

Troy.