html newbie question about using a thumbnail image to launch video content...

[BGCarrera32]

Hi:

New with html and building a small table of thumbnail images that launch images and other content. All of my images are working...but I have a thumbnail snapshot of a video I wish to launch. The snapshot appears correctly in the table, I think my line of "code" is correct, and all of the images, files, etc. are in the same folder. When I click my thumbnail it launches windows media player, but gives me the following message:

"Windows Media Player cannot play the file. If the file is on another computer, verify that you are connected to the network. If you typed a path, verify that it is correct. If the problem persists, the server might not be available."

Here is my html line, see anything obvious?

td a href="trackday.wmv" img src="trackday.jpg-thumb.jpg" border="3" /a /td

(I had to remove all the < characters around the tags so it would display properly in this post)

My browser is Firefox.

Thanks
BG

[stomachmonkey]

Try a specific vs relative url.

http://whateveryoursite.com/whateverfolder/trackday.wmv would be specific

that img src tag looks funky, double file extensions?

Post the full link, easier to help.

[87coupe]

Use the [ html ] [ /html ] tags to put code in your post. Like this..

<td> <a href="trackday.wmv"><img src="thumb.jpg" border="3"></a></td>

Which BTW, is probably the string your looking for. That is, if you have a image called "thumb.jpg" in the webroot that you want to be the link to the "trackday.wmv" video file also residing in the webroot.

[ikarcuaso]

Based on the error message, your HTML seems correct. This is a WMP error on your client.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/9series/playererrors.aspx

If your link was wrong (invalid path/file in your href attribute), you'd get a "file not found" error instead.

[HardDrive]

Originally Posted by stomachmonkey

Try a specific vs relative url.

What he said.

If the .wmv file is in a different folder(or on a different server), you need to specify the path.

[BGCarrera32]

Originally Posted by ikarcuaso

Based on the error message, your HTML seems correct. This is a WMP error on your client.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/9series/playererrors.aspx

If your link was wrong (invalid path/file in your href attribute), you'd get a "file not found" error instead.

That's what I'm thinking...my code has the html tags as other have posted, I just didn't know how to post it here without screwing up the forum post. All of my files are in 1 directory on my PC, I haven't uploaded to the web yet.

When I chase this a little deeper in Windows Media Player it says:

To enable all network protocols
On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Network tab.
In the Streaming protocols area, select all the protocol check boxes.

And I do a tools>options>...and find no "Network tab"

The files are all right there together in one folder on my desktop. I can go into the folder and double click my trackday.wmv video and it launches and plays fine.

[ikarcuaso]

Instead of pointing your link directly to the .wmv file, have it point to another .htm file (called trackdayvideo.htm in this example) that opens in a pop up:

<a href="trackdayvideo.htm" onClick="window.open('trackdayvideo.htm','trackdayvideo','location=no,toolbar=no,menubar=no,scrollbars=no,resizable=yes,height=445,width=560'); return false;">
<img src="trackday.jpg-thumb.jpg" border="0">
</a>

Then, put this code in your new, pop-up .htm file:

<object id="MediaPlayer" width=500 height=400 classid="CLSID:22D6f312-B0F6-11D0-94AB-0080C74C7E95" standby="Loading Windows Media Player components..." type="application/x-oleobject" codebase="http://activex.microsoft.com/activex/controls/mplayer/en/nsmp2inf.cab...">
<param name="filename" value="trackday.wmv">
<param name="Showcontrols" value="True">
<param name="autoStart" value="True">
<embed type="application/x-mplayer2" pluginspage="http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/MediaPlayer/" src="trackday.wmv" name="MediaPlayer" width=500 height=400></embed>
</object>

This will embed your movie in the pop-up window. Edit the height and width attribute values as needed.

[BGCarrera32]

Thanks...the video not launching ended up being my folder name was "web class" and switching it to "web_class" did the trick (and switching it to match in my code.)

Oddly enough, my site works fine in Firefox, and then won't display my thumbnails in IE 6. My IT guy said that IE really needs to pull the file from a webserver...how do ever check your work locally without running a webserver program on your PC? Seems kinda silly...

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by BGCarrera32

...how do ever check your work locally without running a webserver program on your PC? Seems kinda silly...

Not really.

A webserver is a specific suite of software that is intended to serve web pages.

Why would you want to evaluate your work outside of the environment that it is created for?

Look at and get MAMP.

It's free.