No sound when viewing movie in Windows browser

Question

Hi.
I posted a video on my website and it plays fine when viewed on any Mac browser but plays without sound when viewed with IE after booting Windows XP under Boot Camp. The following message appears under Windows when the video is selected:
"Additional software is required for QuickTime to play back this media. It may be available from the QuickTime Components page."
I couldn't see anything on the Components page that seemed suitable.
The video was taken with a DV-PAL camcorder, edited in iMovie HD and exported to QuickTime movie with Expert Settings using H.264 codec and MPEG 4 Low Delay AAC sound setting at 48 kHz (the only available rate option) and 160 kbps bit rate. As well as the original soundtrack (dialogue) the movie has an imported music soundtrack consisting of two files, one .mp4 format and one .m4a format. I assume it is these imported tracks that are causing the problem, since I have QT Pro on my Mac, but only the free QT on Windows. All the other movies I have posted only have a single soundtrack (either original camera soundtrack or imported music, not both), and all play fine on both Windows and Macs.
My question: what do I need to do to make my movie play without problem on any platform, without additional software being required by the viewer?
Thanks.

Answer 1

I solved the problem by re-exporting my movie with IMA 4:1 format sound. This doesn't compress as much as MPEG 4 Low Delay AAC but at least IE8 can handle multi-track sound with it. IE8 can handle MPEG 4 Low Delay AAC encoded SINGLE-TRACK sound fine, just not (apparently) multi-track. So if your movie only uses the original video soundtrack, or if it only uses a music track (with a slideshow, for example), it'll work fine. But if you have both, for example fading dialogue and music in and out, you might want to check that it plays as expected in the Windows IE world. If your movie plays without sound in IE, try another sound format. I didn't experiment with all the iMovie sound export options as I struck lucky first time with IMA 4:1.
I learned about and recommend the free program IE Tester (http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage) from another poster here. It allows you to test web pages with IE all the way back to version 5. If 80% of internet surfers use IE (as some claim), we Mac-users really need to test our sites using this browser. My problematic movie now works fine with all tested versions of IE.