asking for download or real time playing?

[Fking]

When you browse site with direct links to video files
Some of them ask for downloading, other are just starting to play in real time.....

Does it depends on the extensions?
How i can know which extensions will ask for download and which will start playing in the default player for the system?

[jimmalenko]

Are you asking this from a user point of view or from a developer point of view ?

[mats.hogberg]

From a user POV, the difference is if you have the file extension associated with an application. If you do, and you click a link to a file with let's say ".xls" extension, and you have Excel correctly installed, the file would open in Excel. If you didn't have Excel, you'd get the download dialog. Same principle applies to video files.
As there is no way for the web server to know what each individual user has installed locally, this is hard to control from a developer POV. (Add to that, that different web browsers handles this differently, and that a browser can be set to handle it differently.)
However, there are server side tricks to force the download dialog to always pop up regardless of what the client has installed or not, but that's about it...

/Mats

[Fking]

i'm asking from the developers point of view
i'm aware that it depends a lot on the user settings

but i want when they have player associated, it to be run by the player.

all my files are with .avi extension, but a lot of my users complain that they have to download the whole thing before playing it....


p.s.
all the files are wmv9 compressed

[mats.hogberg]

Ah - That's another story. You want it streaming. Never done that, but I'd take a look at some media server - Real and MS have their separate flavors.

/Mats

[Fking]

well just playing it as downloading
as it is with all the fun clips sites....

but don't want to insert an object tag in the html, but just play as downloading

[mats.hogberg]

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/server/server.aspx

/Mats