Multimedia for the Web

The Web was originally a text-only medium; the H in HTML standing for "hypertext", not "hypermedia". In 1993, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina added the <IMG> tag to their Mosaic for X Windows browser - and fueled the Web explosion we're still witnessing.. As well as pictures, one can also experience sound and movies. Nobody has yet invented the "scratch and sniff" monitor, but.. Two further developments are "streaming", which allows playback to begin before the files are fully downloaded; and three-dimensional presentations of sound and scenes.

The major impediment to multimedia on the Web has been bandwidth - the amount of data that can be transferred to the user's browser. Until recently, most users had only a 14.4K modem, which was not really adequate for sound or video. 28.8K marks the lower end of the useful multimedia bandwidth range, and if you want to design your Web site to reach these users, you will need to be cautious in your use of bandwidth. In particular, you should avoid gimmicks on your home page that may cause the user to wait more than a minute. Simply announce on your home page that you do have some really cool Java, Shockwave, VRML, or whatever, and here are the links..

The Evolution of Rich Media - Part 2
Jason Kinner and JJ Snyder
July 11, 2002
Mining for Riches:A technical look at rich media platforms takes a a look inside the technology and architecture of the rich-media platform and how hurdles associated with using a wide assortment of digital assets are overcome.

The Evolution of Rich Media
Richard Friedman
June 19, 2002
Digital content is changing the face of application development. Conventional business platforms are not capable of managing the complex structure and relationships of digital assets. A rich-media platform is proposed.

Skip Intro: Flash Usability and Interface Design - Part 3
New Riders
May 22, 2002
Skip Intro is designed to help educate the Flash community specifically and designers/programmers at large that usability isn't a dirty word. It doesn't mean making boring pedestrian web sites, and it doesn't mean abandoning Flash. This weeks installment covers Testing Your Work and Making the Component. From New Riders Publishing.

Skip Intro: Flash Usability and Interface Design - Part 2
New Riders
May 15, 2002
Skip Intro is designed to help educate the Flash community specifically and designers/programmers at large that usability isn't a dirty word. It doesn't mean making boring pedestrian web sites, and it doesn't mean abandoning Flash. Skip Intro guides designers through understanding the site requirements and their intended users and then starts them down the road of developing for those users, by taking them step-by-step through design scenerios, rather than providing strict rules of usability.

Skip Intro: Flash Usability and Interface Design
New Riders
May 8, 2002
You know you need good user interface design. You've heard that 99% of Flash is bad. You want to start creating Flash sites with a good UI, but you just dont know where to start. If so then this is the book you've been looking for.

Using music on a website.
Lee Creek
June 18, 2001
Trying to add music to your site or maybe you're not happy with your current setup? Well Lee Creeks lays it out for us and explains some of the common problems when adding music to our pages.

Windows Media: JavaScript Buttons
Jeff Rule
June 11, 2001
In this final installment, Jeff describes using JavaScript to control embedded video in the Windows Media Player. Also covered is the ability to search video for a specific word.

Windows Media: Playback in a Web Page
Jeff Rule
May 7, 2001
In this third installment, Jeff covers getting the video on the Web Page. Included is getting it online, video streaming, and embedding the video in the Web page.

Next Wave of the Web: Streaming Media in Web Sites
Charlie Morris
April 23, 2001
This month Charlie turns his attention to the 'front end,' as he discusses building a Web site that incorporates streaming media.

Windows Media: Encoding and Serving
Jeff Rule
April 9, 2001
In this second installment, Jeff looks at methods of encoding video for streaming on the Web. Also covered are methods of serving video.

Next Wave of the Web: Streaming Media Service Providers
Charlie Morris
March 26, 2001
In this month's column, Charlie looks at the issues involved in hosting streaming media, and considers the benefits of dedicated Streaming Media Networks.

Windows Media
Jeff Rule
March 12, 2001
In this series of articles, Jeff examines simple and cost effective ways for users to get acquainted with streaming media for the first time and eventually to embed video in Web pages and make it part of applications.

Next Wave of the Web: Building the Perfect Radio Station - Part 2
Charlie Morris
February 26, 2001
In this month's column, Charlie examines a couple of existing sites that allow partially customizable online radio, and discusses the technical means to make our perfect radio station a reality.

Next Wave of the Web: Building the Perfect Radio Station
Charlie Morris
January 29, 2001
The "need to be entertained" has joined the hierarchy of human needs. Who hasn't complained that, even with a hundred cable channels, there's never anything good on TV or the radio? In this month's column, Charlie discusses the Perfect Radio Station.

Next Wave of the Web
Charlie Morris
December 26, 2000
The Web, rapidly becoming fully audio-video capable, will gobble up all the audio and video media (radio, TV, recordings), just as the computer gobbled up the typewriter. Join Charlie Morris in his new monthly column that discusses the Internet's ongoing transformation into the universal medium.

The WebDeveloper.com Secret Guide to RealAudio
WebDeveloper.com
October 13, 2000
Making RealAudio files is easy and can be completely free. First, you make a good audio recording in your favorite format, which is usually a .WAV file. Then, you encode it using the free RealProducer program for Windows ( or Mac, Linux, or Unix). And if you wish, get a free server for high-efficiency streaming (or read this article to learn how to skip the server altogether!).

Building an Internet Radio Station
Charlie Morris
September 25, 2000
Internet radio is one of the new Web's killer applications, beating out the traditional AM/FM kind in several departments. Although there's already a huge amount of material out there, there are still opportunities for creative people to develop new cutting-edge music sites. If you're thinking of setting up your own Internet radio station, here's a broad overview of how to do it, including the technical and legal angles.

Tricks & Data, Flash Yin & Yang
PS Woods
April 17, 2000
Bubba, a typical client, wants you to build a Flash application that will allow him to input and display showtimes at his movie theatre. In addition, he wants to be able to update his showtimes in a .txt file that the Flash movie can read. Yin-n-Yang walks you through just such a scenario and shows you how to give Bubba precisely what he wants.

Digital Distribution of Music
Charlie Morris
March 27, 2000
From a half-dozen two years ago, the number of places to buy music online has climbed into the thousands. Will the major record labels disappear like the dinosaurs to which they've so often been compared? Not likely. But it's now clear that independent music distributors are going to be a far bigger piece of the picture than ever before. Anyone involved in the music business, from record companies to distributors to retailers, needs to stay up on the latest trends in online music distribution. This article, which will focus on the current state of music distribution over the Web, with an emphasis on what a small record company, music retailer or artist can do to market music online.

0 to 60 in Flash, Part 4: Publishing
PS Woods
March 15, 2000
The final installment of 0 to 60 in Flash leads you through publishing your first Flash movie for viewing in a Web browser. As a bonus you'll also learn how to combine javascript functions with your movie and add sound effects to a button!

0 to 60 in Flash, Part 3: Today's Show: Babies Having Babies
PS Woods
March 8, 2000
Now that we're getting familiar with creating in Flash, it's time to add those little extras to make our movie more advanced. In the third part of our 0 to 60 in Flash series, we'll add interactivity with actions and gain control with variables.

0 to 60 in Flash, Part 2: Tweening
PS Woods
March 1, 2000
Last week we covered the basics of Flash including the beginning creation of our first Flash movie. This week we'll continue developing our movie and explore composing images, touching on gradients and file-size.

0 to 60 in Flash
PS Woods
February 21, 2000
Flash is the hottest thing in Web animation. This first of a four part tutorial will introduce you to creating animations with Flash.

Web Audio 2000
Charlie Morris
January 31, 2000
The Internet gets closer and closer to being a real multimedia experience. As the Web converges with TV and radio, sequential delivery, which means "watching" a "program" instead of "browsing" a "site," will become commonplace. Full-length features are the order of the day, and we don't even need a browser to display them, thank you very much.

Building My Résumé Thing Multimedia Website
A description of how The Résumé Thing was designed. A step-by-step tutorial article about a how creative non-programmer implemented Java, Javascript and MIDI music to put a multimedia résumé on the World Wide Web. Charlie describes the design goals and principles, and shows how to implement professional-looking multimedia websites with free Java, JavaScript, and MIDI sources.

Currently there are several incompatible schemes for inserting multimedia objects into Web pages. Developers have been experimenting with ideas for dealing with new media: Microsoft's DYNSRC attribute for video and audio, Netscape's EMBED tag for compound document embedding, and Sun's APP and APPLET tags for executable code. Each of these proposed solutions attacks the problem from a slightly different perspective, and on the surface are each very different. In addition, each of these proposals falls short, in one way or another, of meeting the requirements of the Web community as a whole. The W3C proposes a unifying OBJECT tag:

"..which subsumes the role of the IMG tag, and provides a general solution for dealing with new media, while providing for effective backwards compatibility with existing browsers. OBJECT allows the HTML author to specify the data, and/or properties/parameters for initializing objects to be inserted into HTML documents, as well as the code that can be used to display/manipulate that data. Here, the term object is used to describe the things that people want to place in HTML documents, but other terms for these things are: components, applets, plug-ins, media handlers, etc. "