Streaming a Silverlight wmv video to an Apple Mac fails

06-19-2009 5:38 PM |

I have a problem streaming a wmv video to a Mac. I used Expression Encoder 2 to encode a mpg file to a wmv file. Then I used my Silverlight Streaming account and uploaded the video file to the Microsoft host. I have used the resulting HTTP permalink in my IE8 browser to successfully watch the video. But a family member's Mac can not play it (I'm not able to access the Mac).  What shows up on the screen looks like a character dump of the video file. Isn't there supposed to be a prompt to install Silverlight if it is not already there?

Re: Streaming a Silverlight wmv video to an Apple Mac fails

06-20-2009 4:35 PM |

Apparently downloading the Encoder's streaming video output file from the Microsoft Silverlight Streaming hosting service to a virgin Mac does not trigger the prompt. I had this person browse to a page that hosts a Silverlight application, and the prompt did occur in that case. After she followed the instructions for this application's page and installed the Silverlight plugin, she was able to download and view the video file.

Perhaps I should have wrapped the link for the video inside some HTML with the Silverlight setup parameters included. But the Microsoft documentation at the Silverlight Streaming hosting service doesn't indicate that is necessary.