How the Microsoft / Eolas patent lawsuit is going to affect your web site and your internet videos

In 2004, Microsoft lost a costly lawsuit to Eolas Technologies regarding a patent for "Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document."

Gibberish aside, what this means is that Eolas owns the patent for how certain elements are displayed within a web page, and how these elements will function within a browser.

Bottom Line: If you've got video on a web page, this is important - because the lawsuit has an effect on the way objects such as Flash, QuickTime and MediaPlayer movies will work on a website - in any browser.

Background
In Spring of 2006, Microsoft started making browser updates available in order to be in compliance with the judgement. This is a "forced update" - similar to a critical security patch. As a result, all future versions of Internet Explorer for Windows will handle QuickTime and other ActiveX controls in a new and much less user-friendly manner.

In the past, videos such as QuickTime movies would automatically render and display on a web page as soon as the page loaded. But now, users with an updated browser will be prompted to confirm each affected item on a page (content that is contained in an HTML web page using the <object>, <embed>, or <applet> tags).

Basically, this update will prevent web site users from automatically interacting with objects embedded in a web page (e.g., QuickTime movies). These objects will now have to be "activated" first (e.g., by clicking on them).

But since the patent only concerns content that is embedded, and not content from external sources, there is a fairly easy way to fix the problem (and it is backwards compatible with most older browsers). Instead of adding the embedded object directly to the page, what you'll be doing is using an external JavaScript file to "call" the file and display it for you.

In the past, you would normally add a QuickTime movie to a web page with code similar to the following:

<object classid="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" 
codebase="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab#version=6,0,2,0"
width="320" height="256" align="middle">
   <param name="src" value="yourmovie.mov" />
   <param name="autoplay" value="false" />
 <embed src="yourmovie.mov" 
    autoplay="true" width="320" height="256" align="middle" 
    bgcolor="black" pluginspage="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/">
 </embed>
</object>

Unfortunately, that code will no longer function as it did previously when loaded in an updated version of Internet Explorer for Windows. Instead, what you will now want to do is follow these three simple steps...

The Solution
1. Download this external JavaScript file from Apple.com, and save it to your computer. Then, upload it to your web server. You can name it anything you'd like, keeping the .js extension (e.g., player.js).

2. For each web page on your site that includes an object/embed tag, you'll need to add a JavaScript include statement pointing to the JavaScript file you uploaded to your server. This will go in the <HEAD> section. For example:


<HEAD>
<script src="/path/to/player.js" language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"></script>
</HEAD>

3. Place the following function call code wherever you would like your video to display:


<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
  QT_WriteOBJECT_XHTML('yourmovie.mov', '320', '256', ',
    'autoplay', 'false',
    'emb#bgcolor', 'black',
    'align', 'middle'); 
</script>

The above solution relies on JavaScript. For the very small percentage of web site users who surf with JavaScript disabled in their browsers, this technique will not work. However, most people who use the internet without JavaScript turned on would probably not be interested in watching online videos anyway. Therefore, the downside to using this solution is negligible.

And remember: Be sure to test before going live. If possible, it's always a good idea to test with different computers, browsers and operating systems.

[Stay tuned for a future article explaining how to fix the problem for Flash video.]