Eric, on the computer that downloads the file first, the player apps do not open at all until the file is completely downloaded.

On the other computer, the player apps open, buffer the first several seconds, then start playing with the scroll bar showing. However, they could not scrub any further ahead that what has already been downloaded.

Their page was not set up to open the files in another window (as I have on my site, for example), it's just direct links to the video files.

See here.

Are all the computers running the same version of the same browser? Some older browsers weren't smart enough to figure out the correct application first, so they would download the whole file before deciding which program to hand off to.

You can get around this, at least with the .wmv files, by using a "helper" file. Create a plain text file which contains the URL of the .wmv file (notepad does this well), then rename it from .txt to .wvx . So for your English .wmv file you would have a text file containing

  http://www.arenow.com/media/ARE_Eng_Med_Prog.wmv

Save this as ARE_Eng_Med_Prog.wvx then have the link on the webpage go to this .wvx file instead of the .wmv file. The browser will download it nearly instantly because it's only a few bytes long, pass the contents on to MediaPlayer because it's a .wvx file, and then MediaPlayer will open that URL and stream the file, or at least try as best it can. The only hitch may be that the web server doesn't have .wvx defined as a mime-type. If so, a simple call to their support desk usually gets this taken care of easily.

I assume there is also something similar for .mov files, but i haven't tried it. Time to do some digging on Apple's site, i guess.

Thanks, Kelly! That's certainly an alternative I wasn't aware of.

It gets worse.

In IE, my wmv files don't download, they just arm the embedded player, which waits for me to hit the play button. But the same page in Firefox behaves differently: the browser tries to download the entire wmv file before saying the page is finished.

This latter behavior is well-known in firefox circles. I can do two work-arounds--first, I can build a new web page with a frame where the embedded media player is supposed to be, and then put an image of the media player in that hole. I can then make the area around the play button on that image hot and link to yet another page which has the actual media player. In this way the original page will load quickly because there is no wmv file associated with it.

The second alternative is to dump Windows Media and go with Flash8. I am about to begin playing with this approach. In theory the browser should not download the entire flash video at once, but only when asked.

The client wants Windows Media and QuickTime.

Are you streaming this from a Windows Media Server? If not there are some issues like what you are describing. Also, many corporate fire walls are starting to block WM content not served via a Windows Media Server. I started using Flash video to get around this problem.

Duncan