Playing AVIs in Firefox, Chrome, and Opera, etc.

[Wowbagger]

I have a client that needs to play AVI video files, in a web browser, preferably though the QuickTime player. (If not QT, then some other player where the user can examine the videos frame-by-frame, that is readily available.)
And, theoretically, they must be AVIs, since they are the primary output of some programs he works with. It would be useless to suggest he convert them to something else.

The problem is that some browsers don't seem to like that file type very much. Specifically: FireFox, Chrome, and Opera. All on Windows.

They all claim that a plug-In is missing or needed, even though QuickTime is already installed on the system, and it can play other types of files in those browsers.

The other two major browsers: IE and Safari, seem to run them just fine.
And, surprisingly, FireFox seems to run them well on MacOS.

Googling about this issue seems to come up with more complainers, and no viable solutions. (Other than to give them the option to download the file.)

It may be a long shot, but perhaps someone around here will happen to what we can do. Anyone?

 

[Sam.I.Am]

DIVX has a web player that does .avi. Have you tried that?

ETA: And maybe VLC too?

 

[elgarak]

AVI is a container format.

Playability is, however, related to the encoding. AVI supports pretty much any encoding.

In short, you're providing incomplete information. One would need to know which encoding the programs exporting the AVI files are actually putting into the AVI. Or which programs are doing the encoding.

 

[Sam.I.Am]

I think he's having a plug-in problem with Windows browsers in general and is trying to keep from having his clients take the extra steps to change the video format from whatever the native format of their applications uses (MP4 is my guess). DIVX does a pretty good job with Firefox and I think that VLC does too to some extent although I haven't really played with it too much so that's purely a guess on my part. With Opera I have no clue as it's (relatively) a pretty small segment of the browser market.

 

[Wowbagger]

DIVX has a web player that does .avi. Have you tried that?

ETA: And maybe VLC too?

I was, in fact, going to look into VLC. But, I will look into the DivX player as well, now that you mentioned it.

For the record, the Flash-based players don't work, either. And, even if they did, most of them do not have the frame-by-frame controls the client needs.

AVI is a container format.

Playability is, however, related to the encoding. AVI supports pretty much any encoding.

In short, you're providing incomplete information. One would need to know which encoding the programs exporting the AVI files are actually putting into the AVI. Or which programs are doing the encoding.

This appears to be an encoding-independent problem. I am throwing several different types of AVIs into the player, and none of them are playing.

But, if it helps, the client is usually using cinepak compressed files, at the moment. It is possible that other encodings could be used in the future.

With Opera I have no clue as it's (relatively) a pretty small segment of the browser market.

FireFox on Windows is definately the higher priority browser to tackle, with this problem, followed by Chrome, and then lastly poor, little Opera.

But, since this is a multi-browser issue, I suspect there might be one solution to resolve it in all of them, at once perhaps.

Such as an alternative player, maybe.

 

[Beerina]

Neither IE nor Chrome (my default browser) open the .avi files directly. They always save to disk then auto-open a video player.


It never occurred to me as it was never an issue this way. I take it it must be within the browser itself as it's a kiosk-type app or some such?