Jo, can I pick your brain?

A friend of ours cannot see the Norfolk eagles at WVEC...
She has a new Gateway laptop from Aug 09 with Vista.

She has done the tips on the site, but her 90 day tech help at Gateway is over...

The prompt she gets is "Windows cannot play this video, a codec is missing for it"
She just upgraded to Media Player 11 ...duh? How can something be missing?

Now we have had glitches too. I disabled popups for that site in FF and it works better now. But sometimes I have to refresh quite often, anyway. It is rather touchy IMO.

So is her only alternative to get an Win 7 upgrade?
Seems odd to us that a new computer cannot play video? She can play YouTubes, etc. Is this a Vista glitch?

how about other live cams ? if she tries them and they work then it would be something at the one site.. I would think.

like-
http://www.earthcam.com/usa/massachusetts/boston/
or here-
http://www.camstreams.com/petanimalwebcams.asp


What browser & has she tried a different browser?
FireFox, Opera, Flock etc?

codec info-
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&ei=Xjp4...6c79a56c95bda8


Mine just opens in the browser to view it - I don't think WMP should have anything to do with it...

I would have her download another browser to try that first.

A poster on their chat gave me a link: hwcdn.net

He said to open media player, open file, select open url, and put this link in.

I searched the link and it is an IP provider I think. I am a bit afraid of open chats... could be a misdirect? What do you think?
Seems this function opens that one IP address?

(it took me a week to get back in that chat WVEC Norfolk, as Scribble screwed up my password )

Ah Ha!

I just tried to open the eagle cam in my IE 8 and a little Microsoft banner pop up along the top came up saying it needed an add on.
{that is probably the same message she got}

All she needs to do is click the little banner and install that plug in/add on and it should show fine then.
mine did anyway..

McAfee has a site safety checker here's the one for that site-
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/hwcdn.net/summary/

but I don't know what it was supposed to do to help the friends situation.??

I went to the page and it is a home page -- nothing about video or anything...

If she gets the thin banner line across the top of the page and below the tools bar section it is from microsoft and it is OK to install it.
that should do it.

Hers was a box in the middle of the screen. She sent it me, and it looks like a typical Microsoft box. No banner, and she uses FF. It won't copy on right click off Yahoo... all I get is code...strings of code. So I can't put the picture here.
It says a codec is missing. ??

We did suggest she allow popups from the site, using the little options box. When I did that, our picture became more stable.
We were fading to black and I'd have to refresh etc.

She downloaded Media Player 11, still no picture.

She really wants to see the eagles when the eggs hatch etc. Its been two weeks of trying to help her. I guess putting in the IP server in the Media Player directly gives permission? We sent her a recommendation about her firewall...maybe the firewall is blocking it? We have Win 7 on the new laptop and it works fine.
She has Vista.

Some of the other chatters, chimed in. 2 with Vista and one with a Gateway, and they can see the eagles no problem.