Internet Explorer Will Not Play Video Despite Being Set as Default Player, IE, WMP

THE INTERNET EXPLORER WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER VIDEO PROBLEM

You have tried just about everything, checking the blogs and web pages, taking their advice and applying it. Nothing solves your problem: Internet Explorer will not play video. You just get a video console on a website with an error message, or the console remains black and blank.

The problem for IE is that it does not install with all the needed plugins. Yes, some basic ones are there, but basic to IE developers is not what is "required" by users. When you buy a car or receive a free gift, you at least expect it to work properly.

Setting WMP as the default player is not enough to make it work on all web pages.


THE SOLUTION

1) Check if WMP is on the Default Program list.

Click "Start", "Control Panel", "Programs", "Default Programs" and "Set Your Default Programs".

Check if "Windows Media Player" is on the list. If it isn't, go here.

Welcome back if you had this problem.


2) Set WMP as the default player.

Click "Start", "Control Panel", "Programs", "Default Programs" and "Set Your Default Programs".

Choose Windows Media Player from the list. Click "Set this program as default".

You can go further and choose "Set associations for a program" where you can set a player for each file type.


3) Set Computer Defaults.

Click "Start", "Control Panel", "Programs", "Default Programs" and "Set program access and computer defaults".

Click "Custom" and click the expand information arrows on the right.

Cursor down to "Choose a default media player".

Check "Windows Media Player"

Click "OK".

Turn off Internet Explorer and restart.

Go to a website that has video. A warning message will appear across the top of the page in IE asking if you want WMP to play video. Choose "for all sites".


Internet Explorer will play video on any site now.

How to Make a Transparent Image, See Through, for a Website with Paint Shop Pro PSP

Make a transparent see through image.

You are frustrated because you want to make a transparent image for a website and a Google search has many suggestion, all escoteric about special html and java. All the while Paint Shop Pro is quite capable of producing a picture that you can see through quite easilly. Make a PNG image.

Save this jpeg picture "dolphins.jpg" to your "Pictures" folder.

Open Paint Shop Pro. Open "dolphins.jpg" in PSP.

Click "Layers", "New Mask Layer", "Show all". A window will appear. Choose "OK". You will see a "Mask" layer and a "Raster" layer appear on the right in the "Layer" window. "Mask - Raster 1" will be highlighted. Leave it. Click "Layers", then "Properties". A window appears with a "Overlay color" on the left and the "Opacity" rate in percent on the right. Changing the color on the left will not make any difference. Changing the opacity will, but leave it at 50%. Click "OK".

Choose the "Flood Fill Tool" in the Toolbox on the left. Place the curser over the picture and click the left mouse button three times. You will see the picture become more transparent with each click.

Sometimes for some unkown reason this multi-click function will not work. There is a way around this. Click "Layers", "Properties" and "General" tab, as above. Then Choose the transparency (Opacity) you want - say 50%. Click "OK". Go ahead and use the "Fill" tool to make the image transparent. Go to the top and click "PNG". "Transparency" tab, then "Alpha channel transparency". Click the "Download Times" tab and you will see a download time of 14 seconds for a dial-up 56k connection. This is quite high, but with PSP you cannot make it any smaller with the transparent properties. Click "OK" and save it as "dolphins2.png"

Open your website writing software program and insert the PNG image into a webpage. Preview it. You will see that the image is transparent.

AN EASY WAY

Now let's do it the easy way. Load the dolphin.jpg image. Double left-click the top color. Select a shade of gray, say R.192, G.192, B.192. Go to "Layers, "New Mask Layer" and click "Show all". Left click the image with the "Fill" tool. Save it as a PNG image with "Alpha channel transparency" ticked. There you are!

Why doesn't PSP tell users that the program will create transparent images? It would certainly help sales if they did. And by the way. Get yourself and older Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8 version. The only bug when running it on Vista and Windows 7 is you have to begin cropping an image from the bottom right to top left. Resize any picture you are working on in this way.

The new PSP software by Corel is rubbish.

I use WYSIWYG Webbuilder. It is an excellent program for building websites and has image transparency built in so you can do it on the fly without having to directly modify the image. Another program that creates see through transparencies is Snagit, but this is complicated to use.

P.S. To make the multi-click function work:

Download the Filters which are a set of 9 bmp images.

Put the images in the "Texture" folder of PSP8.

Before you select "Layers", "New Mask Layer", "Show all" do the following:

Choose a main color like "blue".

Double left click the top color in the "Materials" window.

Tick "textures".

Choose Filter 40.

Then do "Layers", "New Mask Layer", "Show all" and continue.

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"Internet Explorer restricted this webpage from running scripts on ActiveX controls" Previewing a website

This is another "bug" that Internet Explorer has that is not a problem for other web browsers.

When you preview a webpage from a website building program you get this message:

"Internet Explorer restricted this webpage from running scripts on ActiveX controls"

Some webbuilding programs, for example WYSIWYG Web Builder, allow you to add "lines" to the HTML of the webpage you have built.

Go to "Page" then "Page HTML"

Choose the "Start of Page" tab.

Type
Click "OK".

It doesn't matter that it is above the command line

When you preview it next time the warning will not happen.

Note: It is safe to have this line in your webpage HTML, so you can happily upload it to your website: it is called the Mark of the Web (MOTW).

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