Stupid CNN

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Clicking on the video link on this article I get a pop up that says (in an image, just to make it even dumber):

Dumb CNN Plugin Image

In text, it says:

PLUGIN WARNING

The CNN.com video experience is optimized for Windows Media Player 9 or above.

No Windows Media Player detected

They also give you a “GET THE PLAYER” link to click on and when I do, the Microsoft site helpfully tells me that:

Your operating system is not currently supported by Windows Media Player.

What a suprise.. I’ve sent a whinge to CNN to ask them to fix this bug and support more video codecs – be interesting to see what (if anything) happens..

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11 thoughts on “Stupid CNN”

  3. Bzzt, thank you for playing. It was purely bad web site design. Hopefully the recent legal decision about retail websites being accessible will concentrate peoples minds on this.

    Looking at their site again it appears they’ve made that video part of their premium service so you can’t get to it without paying so I can’t test whether they’ve done anything to fix it.

  6. I run the same version of firefox on three different machines and the same version of WMP too!

    It only doesn’t work on ONE machine. I think the issue is with file extension issues…but have not figured it out yet.

  8. I think I have the solution, it’s not terribly over complicated, but it seems to work on both my PPC macs and the new macbook my roommate uses.

    You have to download and install both of the options from the “get the plugin” link that CNN supplies:

    Well… crap… I went to try and find the link, but it looks like I can’t get the “exact” page that I used, but this page: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download/AllDownloads.aspx?displang=en&qstechnology

    seems to have the same information (Windows Download Center or something like that, then WMP for OS X version 9, then download BOTH options)

    I don’t think it makes a difference which you download and install first, but you definitely need BOTH. I installed just the quicktime support option (flip4mac) and cnn video didn’t work, but once I had downloaded and installed WMP9 and restarted Safari (and I also verified this in Firefox) things seemed to work fine. Another step I did and am just throwing in here for good measure is I emptied the cache, but since I only did that with Safari and it worked on both browsers, I don’t think it’s important.

    Hope that helps some Mac users…

  9. I had the same problem with viewing a video from CNN. I use the add-on IE Tab which switches to the IE engine within Firefox. It works fine – annoying but fine. It’s handy to have for other sites that are Explorer specific and keeps me from having to open IE for one or two pages.

  10. It’s not firefox. It’s something with the settings on the mac. I had no problems watching CNN videos until my husband messed around with my settings to try to view videos on CSPAN. From that moment on, I could not watch videos on CNN. I have flip4mac, and I even tried to download windows media player; I even downloaded “stuffit” which you need to install Windows media player. Now CNN says that I don’t have Windows media player installed.

  11. The warning was generated by either code on the CNN web server or dynamically in the HTML that was delivered by it.

    Sadly I can’t verify this as now it now passes me through to what looks like it should be the video window, but it doesn’t play.

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