Q: My girlfriend recently bought an iPod, and we installed iTunes on her Windows XP PC. Now she has a problem with some websites. On , music and photo slide shows no longer play, even though they worked fine before iTunes was installed. Apple told me to make sure iTunes wasn’t the default audio player, and it isn’t. Deleting QuickTime (a media player used by iTunes) fixed the problem with MySpace, but then iTunes wouldn’t work.
A message says we either have Javascript turned off or we have an old version of Adobe’s Flash player.
But I can’t download a new version of Flash player, even though I’ve turned off PC security features in hopes that would help. Any suggestions?
A: Neither iTunes nor QuickTime is inherently incompatible with . I have both installed on my Windows XP machine, and I can still listen to music and view slide shows on .
Check out this Apple Web page explaining potential conflicts between QuickTime or iTunes and other software on your PC: . For MySpace problems that cause music not to play, see . Sometimes you must uninstall an old version of Adobe Flash player in order to install a new one. For details, see
.
It’s also possible that your browser security settings need to be adjusted.
In Firefox, click Tools, Options and then Content, and make sure Enable Javascript and Enable Java are both turned on.
In Internet Explorer, click Tools, Internet options, Security and Custom, then make sure that, under the Downloads heading, both “File download” and “Font download” are enabled.
Q: I’d like to e-mail movies of maybe five minutes in length, but the files get too large. Is there a way to send a digital video by converting it to another form that is quicker to upload and download?
A: Microsoft’s Windows Media Video file format (WMV) compresses five-minute movies into small enough files that they can be sent via e-mail. I’ve seen five-minute TV music videos reduced in size to about 5 megabytes using WMV. That’s well under the 20-megabyte-per-e-mail limit set by Google for its free Gmail service.
For a brief overview on how WMV works, see .
