Dreamweaver CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Chapter 17. Adding Sound, Video, and Animation

As you learned in previous chapters, you can bring your website to life with interactive and animated pages using Cascading Style Sheets (Chapter 3), JavaScript widgets, Dreamweaver effects and behaviors (Chapter 15), and images (Chapter 5). But as you’ve probably seen by now, today’s web pages go even further—they blink, sing, and dance with sound, videos, and interactive animations. Creating these sophisticated pages is the subject of this chapter.

You’ll start off learning how to use the HTML5 tags to add audio and video to your pages. Along the way, you’ll learn about the file formats (also known as “containers”) that today’s web browsers work with. There’s one fly in the ointment of web audio and video, however: browser compatibility. Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox expect you to deliver video and audio in specific file formats. This chapter tells you what the issues are and shows you how to convert media into formats that reach the widest audience. YouTube is a good option for storing video on the Internet and then serving it up on your own site. You’ll learn how to do that in this chapter, too.

For years, Adobe’s Flash program dominated the web universe in a couple of areas: animated graphics (think web ads and games) and video delivery (think YouTube and movie trailers). The reason was simple: nearly all desktop computers had the Flash player installed. The world changed once everyone started using phones and tablets ...