I used the "open url" function in the player itself (you can't usually drag-and-drop in that way on pc). The nasty little thing loads slowly because it insists on displaying advertising before doing anything useful. It couldn't open the file to begin with, but did condescend to inform me that it required new codecs (these are procedural updates of some sort that take into account changes in encoding methods and so on); but that, because I had disabled "automatic codec download" (I make all these obnoxious little media players ask first before they access the web) it couldn't do it, and it wouldn't tell me which ones it wanted. Pure spite, of course. I had to enable automatic download and try again: whereupon it did what it wanted without telling me the details, but was thereafter able to play the files.

The appropriate MIME type doesn't seem to be set on that server, incidentally, as Netscape opens the video files as if they were text. With a certain amount of arsing about I can no doubt override this by giving Netscape its own instructions at my end, but I don't know that I can be bothered. Most of this would be unnecessary if people were to encode their files in sensible formats in the first place.