I think it's more the State curriculum handed out by a board of stuffy knowitalls, rather than the exceptional teachers.

May need that plugin.. I do think it's a Windows Media Player issue, what makes me think that is also the music status thing in Xfire. Completely refuses to detect WMP11 - considering it's causing issues with Firefox and not IE (surprise surprise), it may not be a HTML coding issue..?

TAFE teachers have a fair bit of leeway in the curriculum they teach, that or my 2 main ones just said fuck it and taught us what they wanted. They did mention that they had a lot of self determination though.

The good thing is that outdated stuff can be pushed aside but the downside is that you need good teachers who are in short supply (especially at my uni).
Well when I was screwing around with this earlier, the media player error that came up was trying to tell me I didn't have soundcard drivers (no idea what that was about).

Hey there's an idea, fuck off media player entirely and use VLC, its lightweight and usually very reliable. Give this a bash:
http://wiki.videolan.org/HowTo_Integrate_VLC_plugin_in_your_webpage

lol @ no soundcard drivers. Might not want to mention that to all of the other applications that work just fine, they might start getting ideas above their station. :3

VLC is an awesome media player, at the end of the day, if it is a problem with Windows Media Player (as far as compatibility) there isn't much that can be done to get ~100% compatibility for all (if it was a website going live, for instance, but then you probably wouldn't be embedding..) would involve either Microsoft fixing the problem, or installing a third party fix.

As far as to your earlier comment about pushing the outdated stuff aside, yes, that is always an option, and a sensible one. The bad thing is when you're being taught nothing but the outdated coding and have to go out and learn by yourself. Kind of makes being a student somewhat pointless in that case.

Hey I never knew you went to my uni

Rofl. Well played, sir, well played.

I WISH I was joking, seriously

Virama,

I am not entirely sure what your task is. Do you simply need to get a video playing in a web page? HTML5 does have the video tag, but you'd need to play about with encodings, as someone else mentioned. If they want you to start using embedded WMP, you're in for more cross browser fun, as some browsers will want you to use <embed>, others will go for <object> There is a simple way to do this however...

Find a site that does whatever your project brief is, and right click on it, then select "view source". If you're just coding static HTML then you're given the answer every time you visit a web page.

A link that may be of help: Video for Everybody.

Defining different video formats through the Video tag (so that if the browser cannot display the first, it tries the second and so on), then falling back to flash if the browser doesn't understand the video tag at all, and lastly to a still image if neither flash nor video with any of the available formats are supported.

Look at the source between the two "======" lines to try understanding how it works.

I owe everyone a MASSIVE apology. The offer of the free gog still stands, and I will try and test each suggestion in chronological order when I have a moment to sit down and BREATHE!

So much crap happened - 4 days before moving down to Melbourne the landlord of the flat i had already signed the lease to etc decided to pull out because "he wants to renovate"... (He didn't sign the lease so it's legal for him to do that the fuckwad) and yeah, it's been a mad scramble to find somewhere to live. Thank god for best friends.

Also, the net here is fucked atm - they've gone over the monthly cap so it's nearly impossible to do anything on the net except this, gmail and facebook (works ten percent of the time - yes, that was an arbitary number by the way heh) so yes.... Apologies again, and thank you all so much for the great help!

Here is a link to the working page:
http://www.tafeweb.com/edanchapman/index.html

And yes, i know it's boring and crap. Meh. I just needed a pass from this course.

Tossing my hat in the ring here, because of my personal experience with some of the oddities of FF loading from localhost: have you tried renaming your videos with no spaces in the name? In a few instances, I've seen FF barf everywhere when trying to read character strings for names with spaces while running from localhost.

It's not *likely* that this is what's wrong, but as something that you can check in 30 seconds, I thought that I'd offer the comment to ya.

--Pacem!