Lesson 13-Delivery Basics

Basics of Delivering QuickTime Movies

files on disk or CD (local delivery)
- the luxury of bandwidth
- enjoy more high quality media
- movies and media play in both QuickTime Player or plugin
- media not available from anywhere/anytime
over the Web using HTTP
- Fast Start (Progressive Download)
- access to media from anywhere/anytime
- bandwidth limitations unless users willing to wait
as real-time streaming movies using RTSP
- no copy downloaded to user
- random access to long clips
- requires streaming server
- movies need to be "hinted" for server
- only way to send live streams

If you are providing links to QuickTime media from web pages, whether the pages be local, HTTP, or streaming, you will probably want to avoid just straight ahead linking directly to the media file.

You may wish to view last year's ATMI presentation which looks at examples using the EMBED tag for delivering QuickTime over the Web and streaming:

http://www.newmedia.alma.edu/atmi2001/

It is important to know that certain EMBED attributes are understood by the browser and others are specific to the plugin being called. The main objective when embedding your media is to construct the EMBED tag (also the OBJECT tag) properly to avoid misfires.

Wrapping an EMBED tag with the OBJECT tag

<OBJECT CLASSID="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" 
WIDTH="160" HEIGHT="16" CODEBASE="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab">

<PARAM name="SRC" VALUE="TakeFive.mov">

<PARAM name="CONTROLLER" VALUE="TRUE">

<PARAM name="AUTOPLAY" VALUE="FALSE">

<PARAM name="VOLUME" VALUE="75">

<PARAM name="CACHE" VALUE="FALSE">

<EMBED SRC="TakeFive.mov" WIDTH="160" HEIGHT="16" 
CONTROLLER="TRUE" AUTOPLAY="FALSE" VOLUME="75" CACHE="FALSE" 
TYPE="video/quicktime" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/">

</EMBED>

</OBJECT>

Notice the additional parameters for the EMBED, some of which are duplicated in the OBJECT tag:

TYPE="video/quicktime"

PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/"

VOLUME="Percent" (0-300)

Be sure to check out the copy of "Pageot" in your resources folder. This is a freeware tool which greatly facilitates the creation of EMBED and OBJECT tag wrapping. Other tools that exist that will batch process entire web sites and convert EMBED only tags to OBJECT/EMBED combinations.

View example in browser