JavaScript Pop up and Quicktime

[fastForward]

Im trying to open our demo reel in a pop up window from our site but I keep hitting a brick wall. On slower systems or slower connections, the popup opens but it has a white background which looks like it's not doing anything at all but actually it is just preloading the ENTIRE movie before it begins. So I gave up and embedded the movie in an HTML page, very simple black background with the movie in the middle. Same movie file except in its own HTML page. When you load the page there is no white background, the quicktime player, complete with quicktime logo, shows up. It still needs to load but people actually know that something is there.

I guess I could stop right there since it works but personally I think it looks stupid. So I've been trying to fix it for a few days now with no luck. I thought it might be the javascript itself but then I used Kirupa's tutorial for popup windows which seems to call the action from within Flash. No luck there either. So now I'm completely stumped. Any ideas?

Here's a link to the site . . . visit the demo section to see what I'm talking about.

Blackburst Entertainment (http://www.blackburstentertainment.com)

BTW, I don't think its a matter of compressing the file because I have tested just about every way of compressing quicktimes with no real difference.

Thanks in advance!

[lostinbeta]

Well you are streaming a movie via Quicktime, no matter what you do there will be delaying and loading time. There are always going to be people with slower dial-up modems or slower computers, or people with older browsers, etc. About the only way around this problem is the have the link be a download link to download a .zip file that contains the Quicktime file, that way they download it and open it to play it.

So that leaves 2 options, stick with the loading time, or have the user download to their computer and open to view.

Unless I misunderstood your question, it was a bit confusing since you said everything works perfectly but it looks stupid and you think it's a problem with the javascript... but that makes no sense since the javascript makes the pop-up window and has nothing to do with the playing of your movie.

[fastForward]

yeah, looking at it now it seems a little confusing, sorry about that. Here's the deal:

I have a quicktime movie that I want to stream off of my site. When I place it in its own page, just a simple html page like this, (http://www.blackburstentertainment.com/demo.htm) the page opens with the movie in the middle and the "q" logo appears right away - looking like something is happening. Even on slow computers the quicktime player pops up really quick, the movie may download slow but at least there's something there visually to represent that a quicktime is on its way.

But when I use javascript to pop up the movie it opens the new window just fine but inside the window there's just a white background. No logo, no hint of a movie on its way, nothing. But if you wait long enough it starts playing. To some people (namely our clients, or if we're lucky, potential clients) this looks like a blank page and they close it.

This is my problem . . . it's the SAME quicktime file. Why is the popup taking so long to show that the new window contains a quicktime movie? It seems like the popup window needs to preload the entire movie before it shows anything at all while the HTML page knows that theres a quicktime movie there and it uses the "q" logo as a sort of splash screen.

Here's the link to our site again. (http://www.blackburstentertainment.com) Click on the Demo button at the top.

I hope that makes a little more sense, because I've been up so long trying to fix this I don't know what makes sense anymore. Sorry for the confusion . . . hope this helps

[lostinbeta]

Ok this does make more sense now and I see your problem, however I am still confused. Not about your situation, just about why it does it.

The javascript used in the pop-up tutorial does nothing but pop-up a window, I honestly have no clue why it would be effecting your html content inside because there is no way it should be doing that.

I right clicked and viewed source on the file in the pop up and all I got was <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"></HEAD>
<BODY></BODY></HTML>
Are you sure that you aren't still linking to the Quicktime file instead of the .html file you created?

[fastForward]

okay, im officially an idiot. That was the problem! I guess for some reason if you call the .mov file from the javascript it needs to preload the entire movie before you see anything. If you embed it in an HTML file then call the .htm file from the javascript it works. I just have to fix the borders but who cares . . . it works!!!! Now I can sleep!!

Thank You!

[lostinbeta]

Well the borders are easy to fix... just modify the <BODY> tag in the HTML to read

<BODY TOPMARGIN="0" LEFTMARGIN="0" BOTTOMMARGIN="0" RIGHTMARGIN="0" MARGINWIDTH="0" MARGINHEIGHT="0">

And voila, no more HTML margins.