A few people with Windows 98 have reported difficulty playing our Windows Media files. I don't know if that means everybody with Windows 98 necessarily can't view them, but there's certainly a segment of them who have difficulty.
The fact that this is a recent development suggests that it's related to our adoption of the ASX file format. An ASX file is native to the Windows Media player, and is actually just a pointer to a standard WMV file. So compatibility shouldn't be a problem. However, I suppose it's possible that ASX is a newer format, and not readable by older versions of the Windows Player. If, for example, version 10 is the earliest version of the Windows player capable of reading ASX, but version 9 is the highest version available to users of Windows 98, that would certainly explain why our Windows 98 users are having difficulty.
If anyone out there has any knowledge of ASX compatibility with earlier versions of WMP or Windows, any information you could provide would be appreciated.
In the meantime, Quicktime is probably your best option. The fact that it remains in memory means that you don't have to re-buffer the stream each and every time you play (or re-position the cursor). And for analysis of dance steps, you can't beat the frame advance feature. I honestly don't understand the appeal of Windows over Quicktime, but it's still apparently pretty popular, so we'll keep providing it as an option.
Regards,
Jonathan Atkinson
www.ballroomdancers.com
