Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Embedding RealPlayer on the page

The most common method for embedding RealPlayer on a web page is to use a combination of the standards-compliant object element that works for Internet Explorer 5+ on Windows and the embed element for browsers that use the Netscape plug-in architecture.

It should be noted that the audio stops playing when the user leaves the page. Also, it is more difficult to get consistent cross-browser performance when the player is embedded. For these reasons, it is generally preferable to link to the audio and use the external player.

Tip

The example in this section uses the nonstandard embed element that will prevent (X)HTML documents from validating. In an ideal world, only the standards-compliant object element would be necessary to embed media objects on a web page, but as of this writing, the embed element is still required for full cross-platform functionality. You are encouraged to explore whether the object element alone may be sufficient for your needs.

The following sample code uses both the object (with parameters) and embed elements to embed the player on the page. When RealMedia is embedded, the suffix of the metafile should be .rpm. This tells the browser to start playing the media in the browser window.

 <object classid="clsid:CFCDAA03-8BE4-11cf-B84B-0020AFBBCCFA" height="150" width="250" border="0"> <param name="SRC" value="realmedia/oakshoes.rpm"> <param name="CONTROLS" value="all"> <param name="AUTOSTART" value="true"> <embed src="realmedia/oakshoes.rpm" ...