Spry and Quicktime ActiveX Issue

Question

I adapted the Spry photo Gallery example to load Quicktimes
movies from a list of links.
Works great in Firefox/Safari... but in Internet Explorer it
seems to knock the ActiveX control out.
Any thoughts on this?
Take a look...
http://pymm.com/reel.html

Answer 1

Hi
i had the same problem. My solution is doing a complete
scripting of the used HTML for the Quicktime plugin (ActiveX). I
have looked how Apple does it. With this solution you have no alert
box anymore asking if the ActiveX should be executed, too.
But it is not easy, because there are some timing problems.
At first if changed in the HTML file the object, param and
the embed Tag by this:
<script language="JavaScript"
type="text/javascript">qt_xml();</script>
so i was sure, that the scripting will be done, when the HTML
is already loaded in the Browser. (First timing problem)
So we will have a look at the rest of the Javascript, loaded
at the beginning of the HTML file.
var sbVideos = new
Spry.Data.XMLDataSet(sbDetailURL+"&type=videos",
"results/row");
var timeOutID = 0
var curRow = ''
function qt_xml(){
timeOutID = window.setInterval('poll_videos()', 1000)
function poll_videos(){
curRow = sbVideos.getCurrentRow();
if (curRow != null){
window.clearInterval(timeOutID)
return qt_xml_out(curRow);
return 0;
Here you see, that the XML of the dataset may not be loaded,
when the script is executed. I poll the data but maybe there is a
smarter soltuion, using the onreadystatechange method of the
underlying XMLHttpRequest Object. I think Spry gives you an event
handler for this, but i don't know exactly if and how. When you
load at first the dataset it can be that the HTML region is not
loaded and you have a timing problem.
So anyway, i used the polling mechanism and it works.
The last thing you need is the scripting of the tags.
function qt_xml_out(curRow){
area = loadObj('video_item');
url = curRow["@video_url"]
if (url){
xml = '<object codebase=\'
http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab\'
height=\'140\' width=\'160\'
classid=\'clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B\'>'
+ '<param name=\'cache\' value=\'true\' />'
+ '<param name=\'autoplay\' value=\'false\' />'
+ '<param name=\'controller\' value=\'true\' />'
+ '<param name=\'src\' value=\''+url+'\' />'
+ '<embed '
+ ' src=\''+url+'\''
+ ' pluginspage=\'
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/\''
+ ' type=\'video/quicktime\''
+ ' width=\'150\''
+ ' height=\'140\''
+ ' controller=\'true\''
+ ' autoplay=\'false\''
+ ' cache=\'true\''
+ '>'
+ '</embed></object>';
}else{
xml="&nbsp";
area.innerHTML=xml;
function loadObj(name){
theObj=document.all? document.all[name] :
document.getElementById? document.getElementById(name) : "";
return theObj;
Now it works fine on my site.