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I need for my web page to have video player that supports .asf format. My .asf files have 2 video streams.

Windows media player works fine for this. Here is my example: http://weblectures.yolasite.com/

and scenarios of opening link above:

  1. Chrome, in Ubuntu, it won't work or just one video stream will start
  2. IE, in Windows 7, it won't work
  3. Chrome, in Windows 7 it works (both video streams are streaming)

My ultimate goal is that user/client has to do minimal effort to stream a video from my web page. I don't want for e.g. that user has to go on JW Player and downlad it and then install it so he could stream my videos.

And also it has to work on all platforms (Windows, Ubuntu, MAC OS X).

Questions (it is similar to this question but I have to play .asf that has 2 video streams.

  1. Is HTML5 solution?
  2. I've seen that Ubuntu has problems with .asf, is there a way to play it in Ubuntu?
  3. Is there some "universal" player?
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vale4674
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1 Answers1

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For ASF/WMV your only cross-platform option right now is probably Silverlight. Microsoft has stated that the only codec they are going to support for HTML 5 is MP4.

Silverlight works in IE, Firefox, Chrome and on PC/MAC's. I don't know exactly about the current state of Moonlight, the Unix implementation of Silverlight, but this might be an option there as well.

There are several open source media players for Silverlight:

  1. http://silverlight3.codeplex.com/
  2. http://slvideoplayer.codeplex.com/

Edit for Moonlight info:

Moonlight was built by Novell in collaboration with Microsoft which provided Novell with test suites, specifications, open source code and Media Codecs to create an entirely open sourced Silverlight-compatible implementation for Unix systems.

Access to licensed Media Codecs (MP3, WMV, VC-1) is provided by Microsoft to Moonlight 1.0 and 2.0 users. The first time that you access a web site that requires these codecs, Moonlight will prompt you to download the codecs from Microsoft and install those on your system.

BrokenGlass
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  • So I am fated to develop in VStudio then, hmmm don't like that. But if Silverlight is not supported in Linux, then it is the same thing as Media Player because .asf can be played from PC/MAC and not from Linux. – vale4674 Nov 05 '10 at 09:25
  • Actually Mono works on "on any modern 32bit and 64bit Linux distributions under Firefox 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 and Chrome 4.x or later." : http://mono-project.com/MoonlightSupportedPlatforms – BrokenGlass Nov 05 '10 at 12:53
  • But moonlight doesn't work with Windows and Mac, right? And there I am at begining of my problem :( – vale4674 Nov 05 '10 at 22:20
  • Moonlight is a plugin for Unix browsers that allows them to use Silverlight content, the code that you develop (the actual Silverlight application that is interpreted by the browser plugin) remains the same across all three platforms (PC/Mac/Unix), so yes you would have compatbility with just one codebase. Also you might want to check out http://go-mono.com/moonlight/ for clarification. – BrokenGlass Nov 05 '10 at 23:09