Window Media Player issues two requests for the audio on web page

Posted by Ron Harlev on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Ron Harlev
Published on 2009-09-03T23:23:45Z Indexed on 2010/04/02 1:13 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 389

I'm using Windows Media Player in a web page. I have version 11 installed so that is the version I'm testing with right now. The player is embedded on the page with this HTML:

<OBJECT id='MS_mediaPlayer' width="400" height="45" classid='CLSID:6BF52A52-394A-11D3-B153-00C04F79FAA6' 
  codebase='http://activex.microsoft.com/activex/controls/mplayer/en/nsmp2inf.cab#Version=5,1,52,701'
  standby='Loading Microsoft Windows Media Player components...' type='application/x-oleobject'>
  <param name='autoStart' value="false">
  <param name='uiMode' value="invisible">
  <param name='loop' value="false">
</OBJECT>

I'm calling in JavaScript:

  MS_mediaPlayer.URL = "SomeAudioFile.mp3"
  MS_mediaPlayer.controls.play();

When I look at Fiddler I can see that the player actually downloads "SomeAudioFile.mp3" twice. Is there some setting I have wrong? I was trying to set the "autoPlay" to true and avoid calling "play()". Got the same result - two downloads.

UPDATE: The first request's user-agent is "Windows-Media-Player/11.0.5721.5268". The second has "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; GTB6; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)". Looks like the browser is running the same request the second time. No Idea why

Any ideas?

UPDATE (4/1/10):
Still no solution.

  • I debugged the JS thoroughly and there is only one call to MediaPlayer.URL='.....' to set the audio file. Nothing else triggers the media player to load the file and there is no other place referencing the audio file on the page.
  • One other interesting fact is that this doesn't happen (the double loading of the audio) when I run the browser locally on my development web server. But other remote requests to the same web server generate the double audio loading.
  • I believe I eliminated any correlation with specific IE version or media player version. This happens with IE6-8 and WM9-12

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