Channel 9 is some sort of broadcasting thingy for Microsoft right? Right…
Now, I rarely go to Channel 9, because I really don’t like Microsoft very much, but if something interesting comes along, I’ll take a peek. Following is my user experience with Channel 9, which may or may not be typical for most Mac users, I don’t know…
I followed a link to a video with Dean Hotchpotch the IE guy at Microsoft.
On the page was a screen shot of the video with a link to the video, but the link uses the protocol mms, of which I am not familiar with. I know http, ftp, scp, etc, but not mms.
I also notice the file extension of ‘wmv’ which I’m guessing is ‘Windows Media Video’ or something, I’m not sure.
Of course clicking on the link (which starts with mms://wm.microsoft.com/) gives me a ‘mms is not a registered protocol’ message from Firefox. Hmmm, I try changing ‘mms’ to ‘http’ which does download a file named ‘DeanH_Hottest_Seat_56K_110K_300K.wmv’ which seems to be a stub file pointing to the real video that should launch Windows Media Player.
It does not launch Windows Media Player, but that’s ok, I double click the file to launch it, and Windows Media Player tells me ‘Windows Media Player cannot play this file because the player does not support this codec’ which makes sense I guess because I’m using version 7.1.x and it seems that Windows Media Player 9 for Mac OS X is the most recent and probably has the right codex, but since I’ve wasted all this time just trying to see a freaking’ video clip about the guy in charge of Internet Explorer, I no longer care to waste anymore time on this so I give up.
Once again, I can’t help feeling that Microsoft just doesn’t know how to play well with others… If this is evangelizing their stuff, they’ve got a lot to learn.
Channel 9, signing off!