Embedding Quicktime Player behaves differently on XP/OSX/Windows7

Question

We've got a page that embeds a .MOV file into a webpage. In the last 6 months it stopped working on some Macs. Then it stopped working on all macs. Then it stopped working on Windows XP. But it works fine in Windows 7. Here's what is embedded in the HTML:

<embed src="/Magic94Scripts/mgrqispi94.dll?APPNAME=FileManager&PRGNAME=prjfilmview&ResID=2784&size=9" style="float: left;" height="600" width="1030">

This has worked perfectly for years. The QuickTime player pulls the file out of the requester, inspects the MIME type from the response headers and plays the file appropriately. A Wireshark dump from a Windows 7 looks like this:

Quicktime Windows 7 dump http://goodoil.enets.com.au/QuickTime-Win7.png

1. The intial request for the page that has the <embed> tag in it
2. The QuickTime plugin requesting the MOV file through the back-end requester

Performing the exact same actions on OSX or Windows XP wields:

Quicktime XP-OSX dump http://goodoil.enets.com.au/QuickTime-XPOSX.png

The versions of quicktime and safari on all the different machines is the latest (5.0) and I assume this is something that was broken in an update, and as our clients moved to the newer version of the browser they were breaking one by one.

Any ideas what might cause this? Is this a bug in Safari? Are there better ways of embedding the MOV file?

Answer 1

I have solved the situation by doing URL ReWriting with the following rule:

RewriteRule (/res/)(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*) /Magic94Scripts/mgrqispi94.dll?APPNAME=$2&PRGNAME=ViewResource&ResID=$3&size=$4 [I,O,U]

And using URLs such as:

/res/FileManager/2785/9/TheVideo.mp4

Crazy, but it now works. I can only assume quicktime now only inspects the URL for the filetype, rather than grabbing the content-header.

Answer 2

You might try specifying the type attribute check out http://www.quackit.com/html_5/tags/html_embed_tag.cfm for more detail.