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Hello Everyone,
I daresay this is a stupid question, but I have a problem which is driving me nuts. I have built a simple website as a teaching aid. I loaded some .avi movies, which worked fine until my hosts' server crashed. This has been rebuilt and I reloaded the website. Now, the top row of avi's work in IE, but the bottom row doesn't. But they all work in firefox. If anyone has time could they look at www.mrsmorlidge.com/Spanish.htm and tell me what I am doing wrong?
Thank you!

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Dani AI

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Good troubleshooting by — this is a classic cross‑browser filename/encoding issue. When you link to a media file the filename becomes part of the URL. URLs are defined to use a small ASCII subset, so characters outside that set (accents, non‑Latin letters, etc.) must be percent‑encoded. Different browsers and servers handle those characters differently, which can make a file load fine in Firefox but fail in Internet Explorer.

How that mismatch shows up: Firefox historically tends to percent‑encode using UTF‑8; older IE builds sometimes use the system code page or encode inconsistently. That can cause IE to request a different path (404) or hand a malformed URL to the plugin. Other causes that look the same are wrong MIME type (serve .avi as video/x-msvideo), server filesystem/name‑mapping differences, or plugin restrictions. Use IE’s Developer Tools Network pane or the server access logs to inspect the exact request and status code — that tells you whether the browser asked for the filename you expect.

Practical fixes and prevention: rename media to plain ASCII (lowercase letters, digits, hyphens/underscores) and avoid spaces or accented characters; if non‑ASCII names must be used, percent‑encode them in links and ensure the server expects UTF‑8. Confirm the server sends the correct MIME type for .avi files. These simple rules keep media consistent across browsers and platforms. For background on URL encoding and the URI rules see MDN: percent-encoding and RFC 3986.

Member Avatar for smorlidge

It's ok - I figured it out. The file names have an accent over the u in numeros. I removed it and now they work. Bizzare. Sorry to have troubled the rest of you!

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