Firefox can play YouTube, but can't open mp4 from pc?

When you load a video on YouTube, Firefox starts the Flash plugin with YouTube's SWF player. The SWF player imports and plays the actual MP4 or FLV media. Firefox doesn't associate Flash with these formats directly.

Can you use a stand-alone player, such as QuickTime or VLC to play the downloaded file outside of the browser?

If you need to play it in the browser, perhaps someone has posted instructions on how to do it. Because of security restrictions, you probably would need to save a web page file (.html) and a SWF player into the same folder as the media in order to get everything to work together.

I guess the school computer has WMP, but i'm not sure if the pc has mp4 codecs to play the files. And i'm pretty sure it won't let me install ANY kind of software on the school computer.

I had no luck finding such websites with mp4 or flv player that lets you open file from pc. But, i would search for "embedding" idea of yours.

Thanks for your reply.

Well, i tried embedding, but here's the problem. Starting HTML5, Firefox DOES NOT support mp4. Quite interestingly, IE does!! Thank goodness my school supports IE, so i can work out with mp4 files, but Firefox is really giving me a headache here. It won't even play FLV files!! Life gets more difficult everyday bcuz of Firefox!!

You can't play MP4 files via a video tag, but you should be able to play them if an embed or object tag is used with a proper MIME type that is supported by a plugin like QuickTime or VLC that can play such files.

You can see the supported MIME types and file extensions of enabled plugins on the about:plugins page.

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Media_formats_supported_by_the_audio_and_video_elements