Your system is missing an optional system software component that may affect your viewing or hearing of multimedia content in VRML worlds. Even without these components, you can still enjoy 3D content with Cosmo Player.
The Cosmo Player console displays messages about multimedia content and related software components. If the console is not visible, click the mouse in the Cosmo Player window and then press the \ (backslash) key to display it.
Console messages may refer to "ActiveMovie" or "DirectX." These messages are explained below.
If you see this message in the Cosmo Player console, your system lacks the ActiveMovie component:
ActiveMovie not available. Video will be disabled. Audio which is not uncompressed WAV or MIDI will be disabled.
Cosmo Player 2.1 requires ActiveMovie 1.0 or later in order to support video and compressed audio in VRML worlds. ActiveMovie is a set of Microsoft services that support playback of multimedia streams. Microsoft has changed the name of ActiveMovie to DirectShow. DirectShow will be bundled with DirectX beginning with DirectX 5.1 and also comes bundled with Internet Explorer 4.0, so you may recognize it under that name.
You may want to download and install ActiveMovie. A self-extracting archive of the ActiveMovie support package can be downloaded from the Cosmo ftp site (amovie.exe).
Upon installation of ActiveMovie, you may find that multimedia files (.mpg, etc.) on your system have different icons. This is because ActiveMovie changes the default file associations for these file types. See www.microsoft.com/directx for additional information on ActiveMovie/DirectShow.
If you see this message in the Cosmo Player console, your system lacks the DirectX component:
Direct X 3.0 or later not detected. Spatialization will be limited to simple left/right pan calculation.
Cosmo Player 2.1 uses DirectSound3D, available in DirectX 3.0 or later, to provide realistic, spatialized audio. Without DirectX 3.0 or later, audio will be pseudo-spatialized. Additionally, Cosmo Player 2.1 comes with a renderer that can take advantage of Direct3D acceleration, if DirectX 5.0 or later is present (this applies to Windows 95 only).
To hear fully spatialized audio, you will need to install DirectX 3.0 or later. DirectX 5.0 or later is recommended for Windows 95 users for better performance. A self-extracting archive of the DirectX 5.0 runtime is available from the Cosmo ftp site (dx5eng.exe). This is the English language version of DirectX 5.x. International users should download the appropriate version directly from Microsoft.
Versions of Windows NT 4.0 up to and including Service Pack 2 include DirectX 2.0. In order to upgrade to DirectX 3.0 or later for full spatialization support, you will need to install Windows NT Service Pack 3, which is available directly from Microsoft's site: Windows NT Service Packs.
See the following documents for more Cosmo Player information: