When I open a local page with a local QTVR movie in it, the movie opens in QuickTimePlayer instead of embedded in the browser.
I get a "need the plugin" icon. If I drop a QTVR or QuickTime movie into a browser window, I get Netscape's "downloading" window and then I get a copy of it in my "downloads" folder. Then it launches the QT player. This only happens in NN. In IE, it seems to work fine.
This behavior indicates that your browser is configured to view QuickTime movies (MIME type "video/quicktime") with QuickTime Player. With such a configuration an embedded movie gets the "need the plug-in" icon and a non-embedded movie (that is, if you drop the movie onto the browser directly) launches QuickTime Player and tells it to open the movie. In both cases the plug-in is not involved in the process - it is never called. When the plug-in has problems with a file it draws the "broken film strip" icon. Netscape sometimes changes the configuration for "video/quicktime" from the plug-in back to QuickTime Player - for instance it will do it every time you launch version 4.5 after having run version 4.0x. I have sometimes had the same thing happen after installing a new version of the plug-in. Open the "Applications" panel in the preferences dialog, make sure that "video/quicktime" is configured to be handled by the plug-in. IE's behaviour with respect to plug-ins and MIME types is different, but at least as confusing and maddening. Unfortunately the is nothing the plug-in can do about this. A plug-in advertises it's MIME types passively but the browser chooses what to actually do with the information.
As on the Mac, each plug-in advertises it's MIME abilities in resources
stored in the plug-in file, but then the browsers look in the "registry" (a
system wide Windows service) to find out which plug-in (or ActiveX control
in IE) to choose. Because the registry is system wide and because any
application can modify it whenever it wants, there is often "tension"
between various parties - look at testemony by a senior Apple VP at the DOJ
trial last fall for an example. Also, because it is a system wide setting
things can become complicated very quickly, for instance installing the new
MS Active Movie (or whatever the lastest name is, I can't remember right
now) assigns all of QuickTime's MIME types to the MS Active Movie OCX -
although they can't actually play every ".mov" file out there. If a
Windows user opens a QTVR pano and gets a sideways linear movie of the
tiles, it is usually because Microsoft's player is trying to play the movie. See also the information given for Wrinkle 2000, which is called Windows Advisory, but the information is applicable to any platform.