I'm not too sure about what you're trying to do here.
I get that you want to use a web browser to navigate the files on the CD and by clicking on them view them in the appropriate utility.
I'm not sure what you're "autorun" would be invoking, though. Web browser pointed at the CD? Image viewer utility? Some other program?
The basic problem I suspect that you're running into is that you're not SUPPOSED to be able to run arbitrary EXE programs or BAT files or whatever from javascript or JAVA in the browser's applet sandbox. That's to prevent
www.anandtech.com/hurtme.html from running something like say, "FORMAT.COM C:" on your local machine and making your day unpleasant.
This gets into areas like security levels in the JVM as well as Security Zones in Internet Explorer (Internet, Trusted Sites, Intranet, etc.).
If you configure the browser so that it's browsing more trusted zones like
http://127.0.0.1/mywebpage.html on that it recognizes as being the local machine or maybe the "trusted" local LAN, it may be more easy to give it extra permissions.
If you have a program like a .EXE or JAVA application (NOT applet that is sandboxed by in the web browser) that is run by the autorun or the user running the program by clicking on it, it'll have typically a higher level of permissions to access local files on disk and run other local programs than you'll easily (without special configurations, as above, and otherwise) be able to get from your BROWSER.
Now if you actually INSTALLED (in windows terminology that'd be something like "registered" a viewer program that tells Windows that it is the SHELL HANDLER for .PAN files, and it installed a browser plug in, then if you clicked on a .PAN file link from your web browser you'd end up with an ability to view it in the browser or save it to disk just like say a .PDF file or .SWF flash file or something like that. However that'd involve some installation / configuration of the viewer program on each viewing machine FIRST, and probably modifying the web browser by installing a plug in, restarting the browser, etc.
Now if you had a JAVA program that itself could read in a .PAN file, convert it to a bitmap/JPG/whatever via its own algorithms without calling other programs, and then displayed that graphic in the browser window, that could conceivably be closer to something that you could run as a JAVA APPLET (sandboxed code in the browser) as long as it was able to read the PAN file from a "URL" on the same "domain" as the page the script came from. Still a bit dicey as to it working unless you ran a web server process on the local machine that had rights to read the CD and serve the PAN files over HTTP.
Though there are probably a few very browser specific / OS specific ways to do what you want, there's no (AFAIK) very general way to do it soley via a generic web browser with no special configuration and a random EXE / BAT file on a CD when no program has ever "installed" the viewer / plug in or is acting as a local web server / file browser.
Originally posted by: pochrist
I'm in the process of making a HTML Interactive CD, Image files and Panoramic files.
Now the problem is my Panoramic files.... I have a Imove viewer this a viewer capable of viewing "Pan" (Panoramic) files locally or via CD. I can run these files through an Autorun.inf with out a problem, but I want to run them through an html link, if a Batch file or Java script would do fine. The Imove viewer program requires no dll or installation (thus no Windows Registry involement) the only files that exist are the Imove-viewer.exe & Imove-viewer.isu.
No matter how I code it I can't get it to run the Pan file in the viewer
I have the Imove-viewer.exe & Imove-viewer.isu present in the directory with the Pan files.
I can get a Batch file to run the Viewer and then load the file, but when I link to the Bat file it doesn't do anything.
Any help would be appreciated.
