I bought Popwires WMV compressor for Mac so I can present video in windows format. I am having a few issues and I am curious to see if anyone else has.

O.k. I select WMV-9 to compress and select "128 streaming" and compress the files, I then check it on the Media Player and everything looks as good as it can for the Media player. My problem lies in the delivery I post a hyperlink with text to the WMV file on the page so far so good....but when I click the link in the I.E. browser I get gibberish, when I open the link in Firefox it wants to download it, and when I open it in Safari it works great! pops up and buffers then plays like it should.

My question is does anyone know why I might be encountering this? Are you using this software and having similar problems? I am at a loss? I want to make it easier but I don't want Windows users to feel uneasy about downloading it although it may be my only choice. Any suggestions or advice would be wonderful.
Thanks,
Mick

This doesn't sound like a problem with your software. It looks like a problem with the server not configured to tell the browser that it should pass the file to Windows Media player. Some of the browsers still know what to do with it (i.e., Safari). I have experienced the same thing with Netscape (Mozilla). On some web sites Windows Media files play fine, on others Netscape doesn't know what to do with them and tries to open the video as a text file. Internet Explorer 6, on the other hand, always opens them properly (I'm on Windows).

There are a couple things you can try.

1. Ask your web host to make sure the MIME types are configured properly on your server for Windows Media files. Or, if you are allowed to use .htaccess files on your server (and if you are comfortable editing them), you can add the Windows Media MIME types yourself. If you want to know more about how to do this let me know.

2. You could embed the Windows Media file into a web page so that it plays regardless of the browser that accesses the page. Depending on the software you use for web authoring there may be a free plugin that will help you do this, or you can find examples of code on the internet that you can copy and past into a page. See http://www.streaming-media.biz/cnt410.html for some examples.