Saturday, October 31, 2009

Playing sound / music on Windows PCs in Firefox & Internet Explorer ( IE )

I recently created an animation out of our logo at our main page http://www.designavs.com where the hummingbird's wings flap. I have fed hummingbirds here in Oregon for three years now through the winters and love their sound so included wing and chirping sounds from a feeder.

With a .mp3 file wanted to share it on our main page and wrote some HTML code to do so in a way that is intended to support 90% of computers (in the future will go for more but for that will have to use Java).

The first time I went to our website in Internet Explorer ( IE version 7.0.5730.11) I had to install the windows media player plug in to get it to work.

When I played it the first time in Firefox it played fine but did not have any sound controls to stop, start, rewind, etc. In the place of where the controls should be it said "no video". I discovered this was a known error with the VLC plugin for Firefox so disabled it in Firefox with a Tools > Add-ons then scrolled down to "VLC Multimedia Plugin" and disabled it. This link helped me:

http://www.portfolioofpb.com/blog/vlc-mozilla-firefox-plugin-crash-firefox-solve-by-uninstall-reinstall-vlc

When I closed and opened Firefox again and went to designavs.com it said I needed a plug-in and when I clicked on it to find something suitable I got an error that no plugin was found. So doing a search I found there is a Firefox Windows Media Player plug in available from Microsoft. I downloaded it and saved it to my computer. Ran the install, closed Firefox, then restarted and it all worked. This linked helped me:

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Using+the+Windows+Media+Player+plugin+with+Firefox

Wanted to share what I did to get sounds to play on my Windows XP PC system in hopes it helps others.