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CREATING AUDIO/VIDEO CONTENT
This page covers the following topics:
Real-time media streaming allows people to listen and view files while they are downloading. This gives you instant gratification. You don't have to wait for a chunk of data to download before you can see what it is or begin enjoying it.
Here are some of the more popular streaming media clients.
REAL Streaming Media
Your web site is already able to handle Real Media Streaming Video and Audio files, you do not need to pay any additional fees to use this feature. You will however need to purchase RealPublisher to convert and encode your file for streaming.
RealPublisher is a fast easy way to create streaming audio and video for web sites. The RealPublisher has a wizard-driven interface for all steps needed. It will make streaming media files from live sources or existing media files. One the Media file is made all you need to do is add a special link to the streaming file on your web page and upload the file to your web site. One file can serve all connection rates. RealPublisher can also create your web pages, ready for streaming. You can compress exisiting AVI, WAV, MPEG or uncompressed QuickTime files. It also creates files from live sources such as VHS, camcorder, BetaSP, CD's or any other analog audio or video signal. It comes with RMTools, which allows you to put multiple files in one stream, or combine an audio file and a video file into one stream. You can goto the REAL web site store to purchase this product. The Real Publisher is also available in stores see the Real Web site for details.
Shockwave is a series of players that let you view high-quality, streaming content in a Web browser. With Shockwave you can enjoy games, animated interfaces, interactive ads and demos, streaming CD-quality audio for music and speech and more. The Shockwave player is free. To create Shockwave content, you will need Macromedia Director or Macromedia Flash.
HOW TO FIND FREE SOUND FILES
Since copyright infringement is a felony in at least 30 states, visit the following links for a large collection of public domain audio files that won't get you into trouble if you use them on your website:
HOW TO EMBED MEDIA FILES INTO AN HTML DOCUMENT
There are a few methods you can use to embed media files into your document. If you want sound to begin playing when the page is loaded, you can use the META tag:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=/location/filename.wav">
If you are creating audio content that will be accessed exclusively by Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers, you can include it in the <body> tag:
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" bgsound src="filename.wav" loop="Infinite">
You can make the loop infinite, or you can give the loop a numerical value.
You can use the <EMBED> method. This method allows for easy built-in playing of .wav, .aiff, .au, .midi, .avi, .mov, and .wrl files. <EMBED> has lots of options. Here's an example of some of the more common ones used for audio files:
- <EMBED SRC="filename" width="144" height="74"> will put a small sound player on a web page. It has play, stop, pause buttons & volume control. The width & height can be changed, but if you make it any smaller, some of the controls will start to be cut off.
- <EMBED SRC="filename" hidden="true" autostart="true"> will automatically play the file, and the controls will not show up on the web page.
When it comes to other media sources such as .wrl or .avi files, you can specify the width & height tags, and include an option that allows viewers to go fullscreen. This is just a matter of embedding the file into a page, and then onClick, taking the viewer either to fullscreen <a href="link" target="_top"> or into a new window <a href="link" target="_blank"> with preset width and height tags.
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