Hi all,

I have a pretty basic HTML question, I think.

I want to embed a couple of MP4 videos in an HTML file. Using something like the following code, I can do this relatively easily:

<div class="figure" id="d0e690">
      <object classid="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" codebase="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab" height="480" width="640">
         <param name="src" value="Pictures/Movie1.m4v"/>
         <param name="autoplay" value="true"/>
         <embed src="Pictures/Movie1.m4v" type="image/x-macpaint" pluginspage="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download" autoplay="true" height="480" width="640">
      </object>
   </div>

The trouble is that Movie1 is 30 odd megabytes and there are other movies in the file. So I'd rather use a place holder. Googling around I discovered that the recommended way of doing this is to make a 1 frame movie saying something like "click on me" which you put on the src attribute, and then you add an href attribute with the name of the "real" movie. If you add target="_self" it is supposed to replace the place holder with the longer movie. This would be the code:

<div class="figure" id="d0e690">
      <object classid="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" codebase="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab" height="480" width="640" href="Pictures/Movie1.m4v" target="_self">
         <param name="src" value="Pictures/Movie1poster.m4v"/>
         <param name="autoplay" value="true"/>
         <embed src="Pictures/Movie1poster.m4v" type="image/x-macpaint" pluginspage="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download" autoplay="true" height="480" width="640" href="Pictures/Movie1.m4v" target="_self"/>
      </object>
   </div>
The problem is that Firefox at any rate seems to understand the src attribute as a base URL. If I click on the player and copy the URL that is produced or look at it in a full screen, Firefox is looking for the href video at
Pictures/Movie1poster.m4v/Pictures/Movie1.m4v
instead of
Pictures/Movie1.m4v
I've tried everything I can think of to get around this: moved the files into the root directory of the page, added ../ to the href to try and get it to back up a directory. Nothing seems to work. Since this is a very common thing on the internet, I must be doing something stupid. Does anybody know how to do it?
--
Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
Professor of English, University of Lethbridge
Co-President, Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs
Co-Editor, Digital Studies/Le champ numérique
Founding Editor, Digital Medievalist