I run a membership based website with videos encoded in Windows Media
and Real video format. Lately, I've been bombarded by complaints that
users are able to access the members area with their username and
password but are unable to access the videos themselves, even though
the videos have been encoded EXACTLY the same way as before. I've
managed to pinpoint this problem down to the Windows Media 9, but I
need a response to send to those saying "Help. I can't view the
videos."
Here are a few of the responses I've received:
-----
My name and password no longer are working. I'm able to get into the
members only area but no videos will load with this name and password.
-----
I cannot access any of your videos with MS Windows Media Player Series
9. I can access other videos on other sites. What seems to be the
problem? I've never encountered this before.
-----
I've been a member of your sight now for several months and am
currently having a problem that is preventing me from viewing any vids
on the sight. I'm hoping that you can help me out. Although my user
name and pwd log me on to the site just fine, whenever I select a vid
in any format (i.e., high rez download, streaming or downloadable
Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, etc.) I get thrown into the endless
loop of entering my login and pwd (i.e., it never gets accepted). I've
viewed your site's vids in the past, but I've been out of the country
for the past 3 weeks and this is what I just came back to. Can you
help, please?
-----
For some reason I can't access the videos! I can enter the members
section of the site but it isn't being accepted when I try to access
the videos! Please let me know what's wrong asap!
-----
One customer on the site wrote me to try to give me insight into the
problem.
-----
There are 2 problems that stopped me from viewing the last 3 videos on
your site.
1. The new Windows media Player 9.0 is out, this has bugs in it that
Microsoft has not addressed yet. The Win9.0 player will change
peoples prior setting. It makes Windows 9.0 player the default
player, and I think it also goes into RealOne and removes setting and
changes settings so that RealOne is not full support on DVD play back
or decompression of streams.
2. The second issues is that once Win9.0 is installed a person can't
go back to older versions, even Microsoft states that. If you want
RealOne to be your primary player, you have to go back into settings
and set DVD and Streaming Media back to RealOne, taking them away from
Win 9.0 When you do this Win9.0 is not happy. Once Win 9.0 is
installed and it changes your setting, and you put the setting back to
RealOne, some sort of script error is generated making it look like a
RealOne problem and it is not.
To solve the problem if you get more e-mails besides mine, as the
Win9.0 player just came out a few weeks back, once you set your
preferences back to RealOne, go to the video and try to play it, the
error message will come up but hit close, which the media player bar
comes back up. Well just hit the play button, after closing the error
message box, you get in with no problems it just starts playing.
Supposedly Microsoft is aware of this problem and will have a patch
soon.................until then tell any others to ignore and close
the realone error message and just hit play.
-----
So, some customers say they can play all the videos on the site except
the last three. I don't know if it's a combination of Windows Media 9
and the last three files (which have longer than usual filenames but
are otherwise compressed exactly the same as before) or if it's just
some crazy Windows Media 9 problem, but by all appearances, Windows
Media 9 is wiping out the Real Player, too, so the customers can't see
any format.
I'm looking for a response which I can e-mail the folks having this
problem, so that they can fix it on their system. |
