Hello
Microsoft have a 'free' product Photo Story 3 for creating short movies from photographs and they output to .wmv files. These files work fine on the computer but as soon as you upload to Moodle they don't. If your default player is Windows Media player you get a message of 'The source filter for this file could not be loaded' and it doesn't play at all. If your default player is real player an error message appears saying 'The file you are attempting to play has an extension that does not match the file format etc' and if you choose yes to try playing it anyway it works fine.
I have uploaded these to the files section and I have the multi media plug in filter in the Active column.
I've also tried it with the embed object both enabled and disabled. Same result.
Has anyone got the Photo story 3 to work and if so how?
We are on moodle 1.5.2
Thanks
Heather
Heather, as a best practice have you considered converting your .wmv files to Flash? You can purchase an inexpensive converter ($50) called Swish Video2, which does a very good job of this and includes selections of several player skins. Converting your resources to Flash will just about guarantee students on any platform using any browser won't have a problem with viewing, and you should get them working in Moodle without any difficulty.
Microsoft always seems to mess up something that is supposed to run inside a browser. Moodle should handle your .wmv files if you don't have an option of doing the Flash conversion. You should be able to just upload them in the Files area within your course and make a call to the Resource within Moodle's html editor. If you are not able to do this check with you IT department that manages the server and ask if they are blocking the MIME type.
Thanks for the suggestions, but currently converting to Flash is not an option.
We have now discovered that if you make the photo story item open in a new window rather than the same window then it plays just fine in Internet Explorer but not in Firefox. However if you force all your firefox users to tinker about with their settings it will make the file download to the local computer and then play just fine - not an ideal solution by a long chalk but at least it does something. Still working on Firefox solutions.
We have now discovered that if you make the photo story item open in a new window rather than the same window then it plays just fine in Internet Explorer but not in Firefox. However if you force all your firefox users to tinker about with their settings it will make the file download to the local computer and then play just fine - not an ideal solution by a long chalk but at least it does something. Still working on Firefox solutions.