For some reason a bunch of sites still require you to have Windows Media Player installed in order to access their content, and it’s been driving me bonkers for ages, because no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the Media Player plugin to install into Firefox.
It would appear to install, but then still fail when I then tried to access the media in question. The other day I decided to track down the issue, and it was surprisingly simple. The problem for me was the fact that I had installed Firefox in a non-standard directory (part of my constant beta testing) and because I also retained a default version of Firefox on disk the plugin was installing itself in the wrong folder.
Having found this very useful Mozilla Windows Media Player page, it took just a couple of seconds to find out I needed to copy the ‘np-mswmp.dll’ file from its default location (typically “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins”) to the location of my working copy of Firefox – “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox3.5\plugins”. Bingo, problem solved. Ain’t technology wonderful?