Problem with Google Video in IE: solved

Between October 10 and October 29, the Dutch homepage of my blog was not loading correctly in Internet Explorer.  Most of the time the right column and the footer were not visible.  The culprit was the embedded Google Video code interrupting the loading of the rest of the page.  I found the solution in Google Groups.  Many thanks to Yu-Jie Lin from Taiwan who found the cause and the solution. 

The solution is simple: just include an additional parameter in the embed tag:

allowScriptAccess="sameDomain"

So instead of including this code which is generated by Google Video

<embed style="width:400px; height:326px;" id="VideoPlayback" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-5180498969169868283&hl=en" flashvars=""> </embed>

Include this code

<embed style="width:400px; height:326px;" id="VideoPlayback" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-5180498969169868283&hl=en" flashvars="" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain"> </embed>

At Google they are apparently still unaware of the problem, otherwise they would have included this parameter in their generated HTML code snippet by now. I tried to replicate the problem in a simple blogpost, but I didn't succeed. So there must be other factors involved, like the length or the complexity of the page.

If you're wondering why I didn't use Microsoft's Soapbox or YouTube for video pages like these, the answer is: Soapbox still has problems with some MPEG-4 videos (the sound is OK but the image remains black) like the ones my Samsung Miniket camcorder is producing, and YouTube has poorer video quality.