Building Web Sites All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies®

Chapter 3. Using Web Video

In This Chapter

• Understanding Web video formats

• Incorporating streaming video on a Web page

• Working with Flash, QuickTime, and Windows Media video

• Encoding video

If sound is cool, well then, motion and sound must be cooler, right? Well of course it is; that's why you see so much video on the Web these days. Web video can be anything from something as simple as your talking head introducing visitors to a Web site to full motion video of sporting events such as auto races. Video for the Web streams into the viewer's browser. Before the advent of streaming video, Web pages with video weren't feasible. After all, who in their right mind would wait for a 15 or 20MB file to download? Not too many people. But with streaming video, large file sizes are possible due to the fact that the video starts playing as soon as enough data downloads for the movie to begin playing. This chapter gives you the skinny on what you need to know to add a lean, mean, streaming video machine to your Web designs.

Exploring Web Video Formats

There aren't quite as many video files as Carter has little liver pills, but close. During the infancy of video for the Web, video was segregated to platforms. Macintosh users had Apple QuickTime and Windows users had Windows Media Video. After a while, both platforms could play both formats. Then, along came RealMedia, and finally, the designers of Flash invented their own video codec (a file format that compresses the video when it's rendered and decompresses ...