Embedded Windows Media Player for authenticated users

[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
This is my first post here, so hello I've been using CI for a little while now and really liking it. Anyway, back on topic...

I am currently building a site that requires the user to be logged in to view video content. The video content is displayed using a Flash video player, however I want this to fall back to use an embedded Windows Media Player for instances where Flash is not installed and the user is on a Windows machine.

The video files for the application are held outside the webroot and accessed via a function inside one of my controllers. This works fine for serving Quicktime and Flash files and the respective players load the video files without an issue.

However, Windows Media Player doesn't seem to know that it is authenticated with the site - when it attempts to load the controller function it is redirected to the login page, which doesn't serve up the expected WMV file.

I saw a solution to the same problem here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11759...ile-in-php

which involves appending the PHPSESSID to the URL. I have tried doing the same thing with the CI session_id from the Session Class but that didn't do the trick unsurprisingly.

Ok, hopefully that all makes sense. Has anyone else had any experience of this type of issue - any thoughts / input appreciated!