Daniel's Blog » Blog Archive · Getting Windows Media Player to work in Firefox on Vista

Sep

2006

Getting Windows Media Player to work in Firefox on Vista

Here’s a conundrum. Firefox is designed to automatically pick up the Windows Media Player Netscape plugin files when you start it up, so then there is no configuration necessary on your part. This has worked fine for Windows XP, but for Vista, something isn’t right. You won’t see WMP at all, instead you get told to install the “missing plugin,” which the service can’t find.

What’s going on here? All previous versions of Windows included the Netscape plugin, but it seems Vista has cut that part out. It is easy to solve.

Stop the presses!

Microsoft has released a plugin specifically for Firefox to restore Windows Media playback. For more information see this post.

The old post continues…

If you are dual-booting with another version of Windows, the easiest way is to copy a couple of files: npdrmv2.dll; npdsplay.dll; and npwmsdrm.dll. You’ll find these in the Program Files\Windows Media Player directory in your older Windows partition. Copy these to the plugins folder where Firefox is installed (usually Program Files\Mozilla Firefox).

If not, you’ll need to download these files. You can get them each: npdsplay.dll; npwmsdrm.dll; and npdrmv2.dll. As above, place them in your plugins folder where you installed Firefox.

Once you are done, the browser will instantly recognise the new plugin(s) and you’ll be able to start using them.

There are alternatives to this solution, which can be found here.

15 Comments

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Vicster

October 29th, 2006 1:53 am

I tried as you suggested here but on Firefox opening, I get an error message that the profile is in use and Firefox has to close. I cannot get it to open with my XP profile.

Any suggestions?

Vicster

October 29th, 2006 1:56 am

Sorry - this comment refers to previous blog entry on 1st Sept regarding sharing Firefox profile between XP and Vista.

Don’t know how I managed to post on the wrong entry.

Daniel

October 29th, 2006 3:25 am

Usually it means that there is a lock in place in your profile which is created when Firefox starts, and removed when Firefox is ended. The file is called parent.lock (I think), so make sure that doesn’t exist when you start your profile.

Vicster

October 29th, 2006 4:17 am

Firefox is on C: in XP on one disk, Vista is in it’s own partition on a separate disk.

When I closed down XP and rebooted into Vista surely that would kill the Firefox process in XP, so there shouldn’t be a lock on in the Firefox directory?

Daniel

October 29th, 2006 1:33 pm

Thing is, you need to have the same drive scheme on both XP and Vista. That is, XP is on C: in Vista as well.

Mike

November 6th, 2006 5:09 am

Thanks!! This worked like a charm.

The Computer Vet Weblog

January 19th, 2007 4:42 pm

Playing Windows Media in Firefox on Vista…

I’ve been running Vista full-time for about two months now, and I’ve really gotten into it. There are some compatibility problems, like printer drivers, that aren’t working well, but overall I like it, more than I liked Windows XP. Th…