Friday, February 02, 2007

Windows Media Player in Firefox on Vista

One annoying thing about Vista has been that whenever I visit a web page that wants to display a movie via Windows Media Player, I get an error message in Mozilla Firefox stating that the proper plugin is not installed. Clicking the link to install the plugin brings me to an XP plugin page (which is not compatible with Vista), but nowhere on Microsoft's web site could I find web browser plugins for Vista's version of WMP.

Not anymore.

The solution involves copying a few dll files into both your Windows Media Player and Mozilla Firefox program files directories.

1. Download the files npwmsdrm.dll, npdrmv2.dll and npdsplay.dll. (Links here are to dlldump.com - they had the proper versions of the files to adhere to yet another Microsoft security bug. Make sure your npdsplay.dll is version 3.0.2.629).

2. Copy those 3 files to two places:
  • The Media Player directory, usually C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player
  • The Firefox plugins directory, usually C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins
3. Restart Firefox and see if it's working. (Here's a page with a video: Pink Floyd - Comfortably Numb).

Full details can be found over at MozillaZine.

Now I can go watch that video of the groundhog not seeing his shadow. Woohoo! Bring on spring!
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4 comments:

Unknown said...

Yes I too found that solution by asking on the Mozilla forums. BUT my point is that Mozilla have had a year to fix this and don't even acknowledge it is a problem! Amazing!!

3:04 AM
Shelly said...

I too am surprised. Many companies seem to be using the excuse that they were waiting for the consumer release of Vista. Well, even THAT time has now passed!

11:23 AM
Unknown said...

Works fine

thanks

2:37 PM
Unknown said...

Thanks a million for the fix. I had the problem and it was annoying .Now it works fine..thanks

6:22 PM

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