Who would ever want to play video on a server?

It's another hack-an-msi post.

Currently, I’m building web sites that display videos. Rather sensibly, we use Windows Server 2003 as our development platform. It is the target platform after all.

Did I mention the videos? We’d like to be able to watch them to, for example, test what we’re building.

Not a problem in Internet Explorer.

And, thanks to those nice Port 25 Microsoft open source peace loving hippies, there’s a plugin for Firefox to view Windows Media Player movies in line. Only on client operating systems.

Wait, what?

Yep. It flat out refuses to install on Windows Server. Firefox installs, Windows Media Player installs. But the plugin for Windows Media Player in Firefox doesn't. Bah humbug.

Right. Let's get that sorted. Download the .exe from the download page. Use your favourite version of 7-zip to extract all the files - the exe is just a wrapper around an msi file. Right click on the file and select Edit with Orca (Orca is an msi editor that comes with the Windows SDK, but it's not installed by default. The orca.msi file is in the bin dir). Now, find the LaunchCondition table and see the MsiNTProductType=1 condition. This is the one that's causing us the trouble. Right click, select drop row and save the file.

All done. Firefox can now play Windows Media files. On a server! Oh me oh my! The end of the world, etc, etc, etc…