Excel Hyperlinks to my Media Player do not work

[binar]

Fellow Forum Members,
I have tested this on Excel 2003 & 2007 with no success. My objective is to
setup 50 hyperlinks to 50 FLV files located in the same directory where my
Excel file is located. A FLV file is a Flash video file that does not play on
Microsoft MediaPlayer. The video player I'm using that plays FLV files is
known as VideoLAN (it's a free player).

Everytime I select the Excel hyperlink to a FLV video file I get the
following message:

"No registered program to open this file"

In short, Excel is refusing to play any media file I have associated to
VideoLAN which happens to be FLV, AVI and MP3 files.

However, Excel hyperlinks have no problem launching Microsoft MediaPlayer 9
to play a WMV file (which is the only file extension I have associated to
this player).

Can anyone help me in figuring out how to make hyperlinks setup in Excel
correctly launch the media player of my choice which happens to be VideoLAN.
Windows MediaPlayer does not play FLV files, and this is why I need to use
VideoLAN.

I have read the following link but it offers no solution:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/298019

How do I modify my Office 2007 XP registry so that my VideoLAN player is
acknowledged by my Excel 2007 application? And it stops showing me the
stupid message: "No registered program to open this file"

I would appreciate any help that will help me solve this problem. Thanks.

 

[Dave Peterson]

I fiddled with the association setting and couldn't get Excel to see that .flv
files are associated with VLC.

But this =hyperlink() formula:
=HYPERLINK("file:////C:\pathtoflv\file.flv")
worked ok in windows media Player (or WMP Classic) if I installed k-lite (a
bunch of codecs):
http://www.codecguide.com/

Before you decide to do this, I've read some articles that say that users should
be more selective over which codecs are installed. Personally, I haven't found
a problem using k-lite. Well, not one that I can remember.

If you have to share this file of links with others, they'll have to install the
codecs, too.

 

[binar]

Dave,
Thanks for your help and testing this out on your system. As you advised, I
installed K-Lite Mega Pack and my Windows Media Player can now finally play
FLV files. Even cooler, hyperlinks setup in my Excel file now successfully
play the FLV file when selected. The sad part is that I decided to remove
VideoLAN from my computer because I don't see the sense in having two media
players.

My theory as to the reason why my hyperlinks didn't work when I was trying
to use VideoLAN is rather simple. I think Bill Gates does not want any of his
software associating with software that one can get for free. I say this
because I also installed a free FLV player named Moyea to see if I had any
better luck with it.
Interesting enough I got the same message with Moyea: "No program registered
to open this file".

My objective now is trying to permenantly turn off the pop up warning that
appears when one selects a hyperlink. I find it annoying because I don't need
to be reminded that my hyperlinking to files can be harmful to my computer
everytime I select a hyperlink.

Again thanks for the help.

 

[Dave Peterson]

I think the same thing about MS and associated programs. I've seen the same
behavior with .jpg's.

Jim Rech posted this a few years ago. I haven't tested it, though:

How can I turn off the hyperlink warning in Excel 2003?

Navigate to this key in the left panel:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\Security

If you do not have a Security key under Common (I didn't) create it by
right-clicking on Common and picking New and Key. Give it the name
Security.

After creating Security, select it in the left panel and in the empty right
panel right-click anywhere and select New and Dword value. Give it the
name: DisableHyperlinkWarning

and press Enter. This entry will have the value 0. Double-click it and
change the value to 1 and press Enter.

You can close Regedit. And Excel 2003 should not give the warning any
more.

=======
If it works in xl2003, you may want to try the same setting (using \12.0\ in
that key) for xl2007.

And I keep VLC on my system. It has some other nice features (keeping video
from a live stream, for example).