Streaming / progressive download to WMP

[badmonkey]

I have an 80MB MP4 file, i.e. AVC in MPEG-4 container, on our website.

It is x264 and muxed with MP4Box, with mp4UI having touched it also wrt metadata.

I just tried playing it directly off the server in various media players, to see if it works. Bitrate is only 1.2Mbps so it should play in real time for most broadband folks.

QuickTime opens the URL and progressively downloads the file as fast as it can, as if it were a regular MOV, beginning playback ASAP. No problems. However, WMP does not - it pops up a meaningless error message (it does play the file locally without issue).

Given that we can assume the majority of mugs out there in the real world would be opening a MP4 file in WMP, is there some way to get this to work?

[Sharktooth]

to make it play in WMP try the mms:// protocol (swap http:// with mms:// in the link to the file) it should work..
more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Media_Services
the client will require a .mp4 splitter, an AVC decoder and an appropriate audio decoder. WMP does not come with them.

[zachdms]

Well, streaming and progressive download are different things. MMS is generally deprecated other than as a rollover protocol to RTSP or HTTP. Streaming implies the file is probably not being saved locally, progressive download is play-as-you-download.

Click the Web Help button on the error dialog in WMP - what's the URL it takes you to? That has two error codes that may be of interest.

Progressive download (what you want here) should work fine for registered file types via HTTP. But you would have to register the appropriate handler on the client side. That would need to be a feature of the installer for whatever MPEG4/MP4 filter you're using here.