technology &vista &windows &www rob on 30 Mar 2007 06:24 pm
Manually Installing Windows Media Player Plugin for Firefox in Windows Vista
Surprise, a complete install of Windows Media Player in Windows Vista does not provide the necessary .dll files needed to play WMA or ASX files in Firefox. This means that if you do a fresh install of Windows Vista and Firefox 2.x and try to listen to an archived program on kexp.org you’re going to get that this ugly little window:
Your first instinct is to let Firefox figure it out, by clicking the Install Missing Plugins. But then it says you have to manually install the plugin and you get directed to install the full Windows Media Player (WMP). Only this won’t solve the problem. What you really need is to download three .dll files and copy them into your C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins directory.
These dll files are:
- npdsplay.dll (download)
- npwmsdrm.dll (download)
- npdrmv2.dll (download)
- Download all three in a zip file.
According to W3C, Firefox is in at a full 31% of the browser market! I can understand why Microsoft wouldn’t make it easy for Mozilla users, but you have to wonder about this. Microsoft has a desire to hold on to as much browser market as it can. But more importantly it wants people to use its encoding scheme for audio and video. Controlling a media format can mean a dynasty for a company, (think Adobe’s PDF). If Microsoft wants to encourage publishers to encode in their audio/video codec they need to start making it easier for people using alternative browsers to view their content.
Here is a link to the MozillaZine Knowledge Base entry on this topic. For most users, I would think the table of contents at the top is enough to make them give up on getting the plugin installed. I was prompted to finally figure this out while trying to play an archive copy of homeboy DJ Riz’s Expansions show on KEXP. Listen to Riz, he is the man.
Update 5/16/2008: I recieved this comment that the dll links were out of order, so I fixed them and also downloaded/bundled the dll’s into a single Zip file to make things just a bit easier. Have a great day. 
on 03 Apr 2007 at 8:23 pm 1.Leon said …
Thanks for the help on this!
on 04 Apr 2007 at 12:10 pm 2.Zeus said …
Wow, that’s interesting and sad! Didn’t Microsoft send Mozilla a congratulations cake on 2.0? This is why I haven’t installed my copy of Vista.
on 10 Apr 2007 at 9:41 am 3.Randy said …
Thanks, this is the second time I have used this fix and it works great!
on 11 Apr 2007 at 5:31 pm 4.SplatterKat said …
This is a wonderful bit of news. I was wondering what on earth happened to my radio feeds. Thank you thank you thank you.
-SplatterKat-
on 03 Nov 2007 at 10:31 am 5.Chris said …
Thanks for the free knowledge and the files. You’ve made my life a little easier.
on 29 Mar 2008 at 5:55 am 6.Jon said …
Fixing once is not enough. Certain Windows Update will reset everything again. I just got my iMac G5 and will now trash my PC!
on 15 May 2008 at 5:40 pm 7.John said …
This is great but the filenames on the links are mixed up. FYI.
Left side is wrong right side shows the proper names in the order they are shown above.
* npdrmv2.dll (download) npdsplay.dll
* npdsplay.dll (download) npwmsdrm.dll
* npwmsdrm.dll (download) npdrmv2.dll
on 25 May 2008 at 1:02 pm 8.PJ said …
Another greatfirefox plugin/find. Sweet combo, mmmmm WMP
I still love winamp though.
on 26 Jun 2008 at 6:36 am 9.jeek said …
will this work on portable firefox? i really wonder because it doesn’t work in mine…
on 04 Oct 2008 at 7:54 am 10.Adriana said …
Hey!Thanks a lot!! Now i know why i couldn’t get it to work all those times, it was so frustrating!!
on 20 Dec 2008 at 11:54 pm 11.AJ said …
WORKS WITH FF3 !!!!
on 22 Mar 2009 at 2:17 pm 12.Jin Silveira said …
Thanks a lot!
That works with Portable Firefox too!!