application/extension detect

Hi all,

Is it possible to detect, from a web page, whether an application has been installed? And is it possible to detect whether a format has been registered with windows/Mac/Linux?

I'm writing a video player that has to be launched from a web page. I need to make sure that the user has the application installed on the machine prior to showing the PLAY button from the page. The player is using its own video extension as well, so when a user is hitting the play button in order to launch any video and the application has not been installed, a popup is asking what program to be used to open the file... No good :(


Thanks for your help, guys.

You could accopmlish this via ActiveX, but that won't work on anything apart from internet explorer, on windows. So I'm afraid you are out of luck.

Websites work in such a way so that they cannot interfere with the computer. Your next best solution would be to write a program in something like Visual Basic.net, which the user downloads, to do the detection for you.

I know it's possible to detect applications such as common players, Acrobat (PDF), Word and others but it's written in Javascript... What if someone has javascript disabled?

I'll keep searching then...


Cheers mate for your answer ;)

- Dan

I would be suprised if Javascript could indeed do that.

If people have Javascript disabled in their browser - the code won't run, simple as that.

Most people have Javascript enabled, though.

Anyway, couldn't you embed the video in the page like this:

<embed src="http://SomeAddress.com" height=1234 width=1234 />

Launch a window with that centered and nothing else and it should use their default player, if they have one.

That way, you'd have to show the play button, but they wouldn't download the file unless you allowed hotlinking to it and they looked at the source code.

I tried that but it doesn't seem to work. Also, the users have to use our player only ... :rolleyes: