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Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS
tip
Be careful when you’re adding audio to your site; these files can grow incredibly large. A ten-second audio clip can grow to over 150K, which represents quite a long download period for people accessing the Web via slow dial-up connections.
Modern PCs and Macintosh machines have a variety of built-in audio capabilities, including the capability to record audio directly from an attached microphone. Save the file that’s pro duced and ensure it has a WAV or AU filename suffix. My personal favorite for recording and editing audio is a great shareware program called Wham. You can learn more about this, and many other audio tools, by visiting the audio tools on the Web area on Yahoo!
Movies all night Movies are found in two primary formats: QuickTime and MPEG (Motion Picture Experts Group).
note
If you think audio files can expand rapidly to take up lots of space, you haven’t
seen anything until you try video on the Web!
The format for including an MPEG sequence is simple: The latest <a href=”video.mpg”>Music Video</a> is finally here!
Web browsers see the filename suffix MPG and know to download the file specified and launch a video player program. The other popular movie format is Apple’s QuickTime, which has players available for Mac and Windows machines. QuickTime movies use the MOV filename extension.
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You can learn a lot more about working with MPEG and other video formats and sneak a peek at some public domain video and animation archive sites by popping over to Yahoo! Do so, and check out http://dir.yahoo.com/ Computers_and_Internet/Multimedia/.
Streaming audio and video Another popular technology is streaming media. The concept is quite logical. Instead of forc ing you to wait for the entire audio or video sequence to download, you get enough to ensure that you’re downloading a few seconds ahead and then you begin playing the audio or video sequence. The biggest proponent of this technology is Real Corporation, which you can visit online at http://www.real.com/.