Does mac support Active X controllers?

[shocfacter]

Hello, I am trying to watch a streaming video on this one particular website and it says I need an active x controller. Does anyone know if OSX Tiger supports this and if so where can I go to get this active x controller?

[camgangrel21]

No Active X it only in MS WINDOWS!! Sorry.

[burning_jonny]

You could install QemuX or Virtual PC.

[eric2006]

I don't know if Active X works in virtual PC, some people have said that it doesn't. Even if you do get it to work, it will be s l o w . For the price of those programs, and the performance, it would be cheaper to get a used PC (or low end used laptop (!) for the price of virtual PC) to run Active X

[shocfacter]

Originally Posted by camgangrel21

No Active X it only in MS WINDOWS!! Sorry.

Thanks for the repsonses all. So not even windows media player FOR mac will support it?

[eric2006]

Windows media player is for media files, like .wmv I don't think that it has much, if anything to do with Active X.

[RacerX]

ActiveX is one of the file formats design to create platform lock in. Microsoft will never release it for any other platform.

Microsoft has also tried in the past to pollute other standards in an attempt to do the same thing. They tried to push an MS-HTML and Visual J++ (a Windows only Java develoment tool). They have also gone out of their way to hurt other formats on Windows that they don't have control over. For example they made MP3 play back on early releases of Windows XP very bad to get people to switch to their WMA format, and they worked hard to cripple QuickTime on Windows (Avie Tevanian testified in the US vs. MS case about this).


Microsoft doesn't believe in a level playing field because they run the risk of losing. The only games they are willing to play are ones fixed for them to win.

And if anyone is wondering, no amount of court cases are going to change this. Microsoft realized years ago that the court costs (and settlement losses) are a small fraction of the profits they make doing business this way. No government* so far has come up with a punishment that will stop them from their current practices.



* It should be noted that the push to break up Microsoft was dropped after the Bush administration took office. Microsoft was one of Bush's biggest contributers in both 2000 and 2004.

[texanpenguin]

As you can see, ActiveX is a bit of a sore point for some people :P.

It's not a movie format, and therefore will not run in WMP or anywhere else; it's a format for making browser plug-ins for Internet Explorer for Windows, competing with the cross-browser Netscape plug-in architecture (which is what Firefox and Safari both use, though Safari has its own architecture too).

The point is, ActiveX gives developers the facility to do certain things with your computer (like play back a Shockwave Flash file for instance). The proliferation of Internet Explorer almost led to an explosion of ActiveX websites (similar to Microsoft's "Windows Update" site), but that was thankfully mostly halted due to some pretty horrific security flaws.

ActiveX is largely attributed as the reason IE for Windows is so insecure; it doesn't exactly 'sandbox' the executed code (which means that developers, both good and malicious) can do some pretty elaborate things.


Edit: Oh, and if you want to watch the video on that site, I'd suggest that you write them a polite letter saying you'd prefer not to be locked into a browser with 22 known, unpatched vulnerabilities (at least one giving full system access), on a platform with many unpatched vulnerabilities (24 in XP Home, 28 in XP Pro, both including at least one giving full system access).