Download Dialog Box

[roadmap]

I have video(s) on my site for people to see. The problem is when you click on the link for the video, it just downloads it and plays the file. How can I set it up to give visiters the option of saving it besides telling them to "right click and save target as"? Is there a code for this?

[borfast]

Hi roadmap

 

Well, there's two possible ways to accomplish what you want.

 

The first one, unfortunately unavailable on TCH's servers, is using a streaming server. It's a web server specialized in serving audio and video streams over the web.

In such a case, you place a link to your content with an URL such as mms://yoursite.com/blabla.asx , in case you're talking about Windows Media Streaming Audio.

Your visitors will have to use a special viewer that supports the protocol you're using, though (like Windows Media Player, in the .asx case).

 

The second option is to include an <object> tag in your pages, instructing your visitor's browser to use a plugin to play that file.

Such HTML code looks something like this:

><object id="MediaPlayer" width="320" height="240" classid="CLSID:22D6F312-B0F6-11D0-94AB-0080C74C7E95" type="application/x-oleobject">
<param name="FileName" value="http://yourwebsite.com/yourmediafile.wmv">
<param name="autostart" value="1">
<param name="showcontrols" value="0">
<embed type="application/x-mplayer2" src="http://yourwebsite.com/yourmediafile.wmv"
width="320"
height="240"
autostart="1"
showcontrols="0">
</embed>
</object>

Note that this code is not compliant with the W3C standards, and so it may not work on all browsers.

 

If you use a WYSIWYG editor, then I'm almost sure it has some way to insert the corresponding code for most of the existing multimedia plugins. You just need to tell it where the file is going to be

Edited September 8, 2003 by borfast