So this isn’t a Rapidweaver issue per se but I was wondering if anyone out there had any thoughts.
I’ve built a page with thumbnail images that link to .mov files on a client’s server. On Safari, Firefox and Opera the files just open and play in a generic browser window - which is exactly what I was trying to accomplish. In Chrome however the files start downloading.
My workaround is to build a separate page for each video file - and that works fine, but it’s quite a bit of extra work.
Even if this is fixable with a setting in Chrome (which I don’t know about) I obviously can’t configure the end user’s browser setting. Is there a way to do anything in RW that might tell the browser to just play the file instead of downloading it?
Thanks. That does it. Unfortunately in my current situation I don’t have access to my clients server in order to change the extension names, but that’s a great fix for future projects,
You should not just “change the extension names” of files like this. You need to use something to convert them to MP4 files. My go to converter is free, called MiroVideo Converter and can be found here http://mirovideoconverter.com
but there are other ones out there. I believe they make a windows version as well if your clients are not Mac users.
You will notice the kind of the file is MPEG-4 movie. If I change the file to .mov, you will notice the kind of file stays the same, a MPEG-4 movie, not a QuickTime movie (which is what a .mov file is). Here is a screenshot of that same file with the ending changed to .mov.
Again, the kind of file does not change, just the extension. Now, Chrome must not be that smart of a browser to notice the kind of file has not changed and just the extension.
Where this can REALLY become a problem is changing a file from .png to .jpg or vice versa. The kind of files are not changing, so unless you convert the file to png, the background will not be made transparent (if that is what you are trying to do).
Hope this makes sense. It might work, but you could come into some issues without changing the kind of file it is. Miro is free and easy to use, so it should not be an issue with using it to change the format of the files.
And yet it seems to work without any transcoding. Just the extension change.
However, I think for the purposes of my current project I’ll stick to linking the .mov files to an HTML5 Player Stack within a specific page - as opposed to leaving it to a browser window and Apache.
