A Little Firefox Media

A lot of Web sites these days require you to use the Windows Media Player program for playing audio and video content that is actually embedded on the site. Now, if a user is using Internet Explorer, this works flawlessly, most of the time. However, the real problem arises when accessing that kind of content on a non-Microsoft browser. You know, like the ever popular Mozilla Firefox, for instance.

Standard Windows Media Player plug-in files are included with most of the Windows operating systems and they are usually automatically detected by the Firefox browser. However, in Vista and at times on some of the other Windows systems, the files are missing. This means that if you access any Web sites that have embedded multimedia content, you will receive an error that tells you it’s a case of an invalid or missing plug-in. You will then be instructed to reinstall Windows Media Player, which still doesn't solve your problem.

To avoid these problems and a few other issues once and for all, Windows Vista and XP SP2 users can now install the new Windows Media Player Firefox plug-in. This plug-in works for Firefox versions of 1.5 and later.

To install the plug-in for yourself, just click on this link.

Simply download the installer file to your computer, close your Firefox browser and then run the installer. The plug-in will be installed under the plug-ins directory in the C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox folder.

Now, another alternative to this plug-in installation is the Windows Media Player extension for Firefox. This extension allows you to launch the video that is embedded in a Web site to an external application. This extension works not only with Windows Media Player, but also with Real Media, QuickTime, Nullsoft Video and so on.

The video stream is replaced by a simple button that, when pressed, launches the media in a separate application, instead of within the browser. This is also useful in the way that it won’t slow down your browser, just simply because a big video is being loaded.

To install this Firefox plug-in, click here.

So, all in all, if you are using Firefox and are having problems accessing Windows media content on your favorite Web sites, either of the above two options should work for you. Give them a try today!

~ Yogesh Bakshi