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Firefox plays wav files in full program and not plugin

  • 20 replies
  • 7 have this problem
  • 8 views
  • Last reply by PCPPaws

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I am trying to play a wav file within the browser without it downloading and sending it to an outside program. I have installed the quicktime plugin, the windows medial player plugin, and the VLC player plugin.

When I go to change the file association behavior, none of the options available are a plugin, they're all the full program. I've tried the advice from several different postings here, but none of them have solved the problem. Every time I click on the wav file link, it downloads the file and opens an external program to play it.

Any ideas?

I am trying to play a wav file within the browser without it downloading and sending it to an outside program. I have installed the quicktime plugin, the windows medial player plugin, and the VLC player plugin. When I go to change the file association behavior, none of the options available are a plugin, they're all the full program. I've tried the advice from several different postings here, but none of them have solved the problem. Every time I click on the wav file link, it downloads the file and opens an external program to play it. Any ideas?

All Replies (20)

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You may need to use the Windows Media Plugin...

Also due to a change in firefox you have to move a file to get WMPlugin to work in v22 and above.

SEE: Windows Media or other plugins stopped working after Firefox update

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Firefox will probably only play the wav file if the code uses an object or embed tag and a proper MIME type is specified that one of those plugins can handle as shown on the about:plugins page.

<embed type="application/x-mplayer2" src="<link to wav file>" >
<object type="application/x-mplayer2" data="<link to wav file>" ></object>
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The default applications menu still isn't giving me a choice for any plugin besides VLC media plugin, at still it downloads the file, even after I enabled plugins on the about:config page.

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So, if the site that I'm using doesn't use the code that you're describing, is there any way to get around that and have firefox play the sound anyway?

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The QuickTime plugin should play the wav file, but other plugin like VLC might interfere.
So maybe try to disable VLC to see if that makes QT time.

Also check on the about:config page if WAV is enabled for QuickTime.

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Disabled VLC media player and now there's no "plugin" types to associate wav files with, they're all full applications, and it still downloads the file and opens the full quicktime application.

Is there a way to 'browse' or manually add in a PLUGIN instead of the full app, because when I click browse, it looks for .exe files.

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Do you have QuickTime installed and enabled?

QT should be able to play .wav files.

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Yep, installed and enabled, but the Quicktime plugin is not an option in the menu for associations, only the full version of quicktime player. I've also gone in and checked the MIME types within the player so they're associated there, too, but firefox still downloads the file and uses the full player app to try to play it.

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Try opening a new tab, then type or paste about:plugins in the address bar and press Enter. This page should list all the content types your plugins know how to handle, at least as far as they've informed Firefox. (In my case audio/wav and audio/x-wav are listed under QuickTime.)

The next time you get the dialog to open or save the file, make a note of the content-type and check it against the about:plugins page to see whether it's listed. If there's a particular site that has this problem, and it's "safe for work", you could post a link to a page and indicate which link to try.

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I'm seeing the content of wav and x-wav listed under Quicktime plugin, VLC plugin and another one that I tried, the MCI WAVE plugin.

I've tried disabling all but one, then restarting firefox for every one of the listed plugins, and every time, it downloads the file. When I use the VLC plugin, it downloads the file and plays it with quicktime.

I finally got it to download and play the file in full windows media player, so at least it plays instead of QT sitting there waiting for me to push play, but it's still downloading the file for the full program to play, not using the plugin. And now it doesn't matter what plugin I set in the associations section, it always uses WMP (full version).

This is amazingly frustrating. All this to play a simple wav file.

And sorry, the links I'm having trouble with are in a mail program on the site, and they're tied to my account, so not able to link them here. They are, however, simple links in the 'a href="site.com/dir/wave.wav"' format.

Modified by PCPPaws

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Hmmm, emails. In a thread earlier today regarding Gmail, there was no way to get Firefox to stop showing the Open/Save/Cancel dialog for email attachments without another add-on, which changes the content-disposition from "attachment" (i.e., forced save) to "inline". Do you want to try it and see whether it helps with your files? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fire.../inlinedisposition/

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Was worth a shot, but that didn't work, either.

What I'm using is a mostly html-based mail/message program that you can set to play a sound when you get a new message/mail. It uses the a href= format to link to a wav file to play when you get mail.

Every time I get mail, it downloads the referred wav file and still plays it on an outside full application, either QT or WMP. I'd really like it to just play the file.

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How does the server sends these files if you check the response header in the Web Console?

  • Web Console (Firefox/Tools > Web Developer;Ctrl+Shift+K)
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[16:10:12.073] GET http://subdomain.site.com/user/youhavemail.wav [HTTP/1.1 200 OK 3696ms]

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You can click such an entry to inspect the response headers from the server and check if a content-type line is present.

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User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:23.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/23.0
Referer:http://smail1.*******.com/cgi-bin/mail1.cgi?EParms=ru%7Ckqw29t@ejjmgeDwkm%22ru%7Cvk9GDwkm%22ru%7Cle9@ejjmge&vqvax=2+HideLinks&vqvaa=mailbox&vqvab=&vqxti=1378957844
Host:soiuser.hyperchat.com
Connection:keep-alive
Accept-Language:en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding:gzip, deflate
Accept:text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8

Modified by cor-el

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Hi PCPPaws, if you scroll down in that dialog, there is a separate section for the response headers sent back by the server. In particular, what is the stated Content-Type?

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Content-Type: "application/octetstream"

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application/octet-stream is a generic MIME type.
Firefox will always show a save dialog with this content-type.

Try this extension to set the content-type to "application/x-mplayer2" to use the WMP or a MIME type that is supported by one of the other media players that applies to wav files.

Modified by cor-el

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Nope, still doesn't work. Still downloading and playing in external full player.