Sep 19
Google Desktop Killed the Windows Media
I’ve been plagued for months, but today I’m free! I like to watch video highlights the day after each Braves game. I’ve had problems on my laptop ever since I was put on our companies domain. I figured it was because they enabled a firewall I could not turn off. Turns out it was something totally different.
First let me describe the problem so hopefully the search engines will pick this up and I can help some poor soul out there searching for a solution.
Whenever I wanted to watch streaming video on windows media player, I would wait forever while it said “Connecting to Media..”, then it would give a message that said, “Ready”. I found a lot of useless tips on the internet, all basically telling me to set my proxy server to match my browser, but that didn’t work. The problem occured in both IE and Firefox. I tried WM9, WM10 and WM11 beta. The odd thing was that I could right click on a video and see the url it was trying to connect to, go in to Windows Media and “Open URL…” to that path and it would work. It was really a pain in the butt though.
Well, today I saw that a co-workers computer worked just fine, which gave me a new determination to find a solution. Well, I found it! Thank you! Thank you!
Turns out Google Desktop has been the culprit the whole time. I uninstalled it and now my WMP plugins are working fine! I never use Google Desktop anyway.
