Stuart said:
How do I insert a video or media clip into an e-mail and than have it
automatically play for the recipient?
Here is what I’ve done so far. Open new e-mail, Insert Object, Selected
“Media Clipâ€. Then “Insert Clipâ€, “Video for Windowsâ€, and Selected a
.wmv
file.
The video plays as expected while I am editing my mail, but when I send it
it does not automatically play.
Because the recipient gets to configure their e-mail client, not you. Would
you want me to configure your system anyway that I wanted? The recipient
probably uses a mail client that restricts all the HTML stupidity from
e-mails, like playing a video that the recipient has yet to choose that they
want to view. For Microsoft e-mail programs, the default is to use the
Restricted Sites security zone (which should be at its default High level
setting). That means video, sound, scripts, and other HTML nasties will not
function while the e-mail is being viewed inside the e-mail client.
If you want to send videos, attach them so the recipient can decide when and
if they view them. Obviously you are sending huge e-mails and pissing off
your recipients who have to waste tons of time waiting for your *fluffy*
mail to get downloaded, especially irritating for dial-up users which are
still the major number of Internet connections, waste the disk space for it
to store that e-mail, and eat up their mailbox quota until the recipient
downloads it and/or decides to delete it from there.
When you attach your video, not only are you attaching a huge file but the
size grows by 30% to 50% due to having to encode it into plain text in the
MIME part for that attachment. All of an e-mail is just plain text. There
are no binaries within the e-mail. Attachments, whether inline or attached,
are encoded into plain text and that balloons their size. Stop being rude
to your recipient. Put a link to your video of where you uploaded it, like
to your personal web page disk space (there are lots of freebie "personal"
web page services available, or your ISP might even provide you with quota
for one), an FTP server, or some other online storage from which the
recipient can retrieve your video *IF* they choose to do so. E-mail is NOT
designed to be a fast, reliable file transfer protocol. Not only will the
user have to wait until the huge mail gets downloaded, but mail servers
often throttle each connection to provide balanced responsiveness to all
concurrent connections which means the recipient won't even be able to
download your mail at their full bandwidth capacity. E-mail is also NOT
designed to be a web browser capable of rendering all functionality of a web
site.
Thankfully most e-mail clients don't operate the way that YOU want them to.
The recipient retains control over how their e-mail client functions and at
what level of security that it provides. No matter how much you degrade the
security your e-mail client, you won't affect a change to the recipients'
e-mail clients. Just attach the video clip (after compressing it as much as
possible depending on how much quality you want to lose). Better yet would
be to put it somewhere online and provide a link to it in your e-mail so
your message remains small and doesn't offend the recipient with download
time and consumption of mailbox quota.
Attach it or link to it.
