EMBEDDING MULTIMEDIA IN

WEB PAGES

Embedding Multimedia in Web Pages

Multimedia is a popular buzzword for sound, motion video, and interactive animation.

Some problems or obstacles for anyone who wants to include audiovisual material in a Web page a few years ago.There are many incompatible multimedia file formats from

which to choose, and none has yet emerged as a singular industry standard.

Some people do not have Internet connections fast enough to receive high-quality audiovisual data without a long wait.

HTML tags for including multimedia in web pages have been notoriously inconsistent; XHTML offers a standard approach that is helping to set everything straight.

Placing Multimedia Content on a Web Page

The following sections show you how to add some audio and video to a web page in two ways:The "old way" for maximum compatibility with all

web browsers, including very old onesThe "new way" that works only with the latest

versions of web browsers, but serves as the official standard technique for the present and future

Putting Multimedia on a Web Page

The simplest and most reliable option for incorporating a video or audio file into your Web site is to simply link in with <href>, exactly as you would link to another HTML file.

<a href=“lobstah.avi”> Play the lobster video. </a> When the user clicks the words Play the lobster video,

the lobstah.avi video file is transferred to her computer. Whichever helper application or plug-in she has installed automatically starts as soon as the file has finished downloading. If no AVI-compatible helper or plug-in can be found, the Web browser offers her a chance to download the appropriate plug-in or save the video the video on the hard drive for later viewing.

Putting Sound in a Web Page

The <embed /> tag enables you to place any type of file directly into your Web page. For media to appear on the Web page, however, every user must have a plug-in or OLE-compatible helper application that recognizes the incoming data type and knows what to do with it. The media players that come bundled with Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator can handle most common media types, including WAV, AU, MPEG, MID, EPS, VRML, and many more. Many other plug-ins are also available from other companies to handle almost any type of media file.

Putting Sound in a Web Page

The following line of HTML would embed a sound clip named hello.wav and display the playback controls at the current position on the page, as long as visitors to the page have a WAV compatible plug-in or helper app.

<embed src=“hello wav” /> Like <img>, the <embed /> tag can take align, width, and

height attributes. The src, width, height and align attributes are interpreted by the browser just as they would be for a still image.

The <embed /> tag also enables you to set any number of optional parameters, which are specific to the plug-in or player program.

Putting Sound in a Web Page

<embed src=“atune.mid”width=“1”height=“1” autostart=“true” loop=“true” hidden=“true” />

autostart, loop, and hidden are not standard attributes of the <embed /> tag, so the browser simply hands them over to the plug-in program to interpret. autostart=“true”, loop=“true”, and hidden=“true” are specific to the LiveAudio plug-in that comes built-in to Netscape Navigator.

Putting Sound in a Web Page

The HTML page below demonstrates the use of <embed /> with a video clip in the Windows AVI(Audio-Video Interleave) format.

<embed src=“3dtetra2.avi”autostart=“true” loop=“true” width=“160” height=“120” vspace=“10” hspace=“20” align=“left” />

<noembed>

<a href=“3dtetra2.avi”>

<img src=“3dtetra.jpg” border=“0” align=“left”

width=“160” height=“120” vspace=“10” hspace=“20” />

</a> </noembed>