As I continue my quest to make lemonade out of the proverbial lemons tossed my way during the course of a day I leave you with the following tidbit on codec's.
Since web development really isn't my strong point this many may consider this common sense but for the administrator such as myself codec's are a pain, especially when they don’t play well with Microsoft (or vice versa) and you aren't particularly an expert on them.
The problem: Streaming Application wouldn't play sound on Windows 7 machine because of missing Sipro Lab Telecom ACELP.net codec.
MSFT Solution: A workaround (use a non MSFT multimedia playback program) See MSFT Official Solution
Since The MSFT solution wouldn't cut it for me so I was left a couple of lemons, I mean options, yes options.
- Hack together some JavaScript to id the browser as IE8 or IE8 Compatibility mode(native to Windows 7), set a cookie, prompt the user to self install codec and redirect to the Streaming application.
- Deploy the ACELP.net codec to all the users via MSFT tools (e.g SCCM, SMS)
- Re-encode the audio stream with a different codec and figure out what XML file was referencing the original audio.
Obviously choice number one sounded best since it seemed kind of convoluted, insecure, and prone to failure. But that conclusion was only made after I wrote the darn thing and realized “Dude, the browser thinks your code is malicious”
Choice number two would have worked but then my counterparts who manager those systems were in the middle of upgrading them and wanted to focus on that before anything else (go figure).
That left me with Choice number three, so out came the MSFT Expression tool which promptly converted the original audio to a windows native codec. Change of file name in the XML config file on the streaming media and all is well.