Well, that title's going to need some 'splaining...
I have protected all of the files in a specific directory with a few Apache directives in an .htaccess file. It protects them in such away that they can only be accessed by a PHP script that reads them in and serves them via header() and readfile(). They can not be accessed directly through a browser. These files are part of a CMS.
Some of these files are video and/or audio files (MPG, MP3, WMV, WMA, etc.) which I want to stream into a player embedded into an HTML page.
Now, the problem I am having is probably a little obscure, but it's a substantial problem nonetheless: when I stream a video or audio file into Firefox with an embedded Windows Media Player that accesses the PHP file serving script; I cannot access cookies. The very reason I am using this protective process is because these files are only supposed to be accessed by users who are logged in to the CMS....which, naturally, uses cookies to maintain the login sessions.
So, because it can't read the cookies, it can't validate the user, and it can't serve the video/audio file to the player; and, finally, the embedded player just stalls.
To make matters more complicated...
This problem does not occur in IE
A friend of mine does not have this problem in Firefox. BUT, on his second PC, he does. My parents' computer also exhibits this behaviour. The only difference I've been able to find is -- by tailing the Apache access log -- that, on his first PC, the user agent for WMP on his first PC reports as NSPlayer/10.0.0.3802 WMFSDK/10.0. All of the other Windows PCs report the WMP user agent as Windows-Media-Player/10.00.00.3990.
This problem does not occur in Firefox in Linux (Vector Linux SOHO) using MPlayer
Any ingenious ideas? (I'm gonna need one)