Make It Snappy, Make It QuickTime Many people still have 14.4 or 28.8 modem links to the Internet. A 28.8 modem can download a movie at about 2.5 kBytes per second maximum, so a 10-second, 500k movie can take several minutes to download. Don't let this be a creative roadblock if you want to include pizzazz in your very own website. By following some basic rules, you can add video and audio to your site, thus allowing your visitors to enjoy a multimedia-rich experience that will leave an impression on them when they leave.   Using Apple's QuickTime plug-in, you can embed QuickTime movies and QuickTime VR Panoramas and Objects directly into your web pages. Version 1.1.1 adds many new features and support for many new media types. You can download the latest version free from Apple at http://quicktime.apple.com/ . The QuickTime plug-in can play many kinds of QuickTime movies. It currently supports all QuickTime 2.5 track types, including text tracks, MIDI tracks, etc. Using these kinds of movies, you can add compelling features to your pages without significantly affecting the time they take to download. Some examples are: Background music - import a standard MIDI file into QuickTime using Movie Player and save it as a QuickTime movie (make sure you select the "Make movie self contained" and "Playable on non-Apple computers" options) . The resulting file will be very small and can be used with the looping and autoplay settings to act as background music for your page. Animation - You can use any of the numerous QuickTime movie editing applications, or use Movie Player for simple editing. Many animation tools such as Cinemation 1.1 allow you to you to create animations and save them as QuickTime movies. QuickTime VR - QuickTime VR Objects and Panoromas can be relatively small and highly compelling. To help you get started using QuickTime in your web page, you'll need to get a bit familiar with Apple's MoviePlayer (see this month's A Spider Speaks to get started). Setting Up Your Web Page... Quickly! Here's how you embed QuickTime into your web page: Replace the name "SampleQT.mov" with the name of your movie, and the values for height and width of the movie with the dimensions of your movie. Make sure that you add 24 to the height of the movie for the default controller. Hint: If you don't know these values, open your movie in MoviePlayer and select "Get Info" from the "Movie" menu. Choose Size from the right pop-up menu. You will need to add 24 pixels to the height reported by MoviePlayer for the height of the controller unless you have specified CONTROLLER=FALSE in your EMBED tag. In addition to WIDTH and HEIGHT, there are a number of other parameters you can specify in the EMBED tag to control how your movie is presented. The possible Syntax variables for the EMBED tag are: The EMBED tag is used to embed different kinds of contents within an HTML page such as QuickTime movies. When the document specified in the SRC parameter is a QuickTime movie, then the QuickTime plug-in will be used to display it. As with the rest of HTML, all parameter keywords listed below are case insensitive. HOTSPOT n = "url" This tag enables clicking on a hotspot with the specified ID in a VR panorama to take the user to the specified URL. n is the hotspot ID as defined when the hot spot is created in the QuickTime VR authoring tools. URL is an Internet-standard Uniform Resource Locator. The URL should be enclosed in quotes. This parameter is only appropriate for QuickTime VR panoramas. CACHE=value CACHE is an optional parameter. Possible values are TRUE or FALSE, or simply CACHE (implies TRUE). If you specify CACHE or CACHE=TRUE, Netscape Navigator 3.0 will cache movies when possible just like other documents. If the movie is still in the cache when the user returns to the page, it will not need to be downloaded again. Note: The functionality of this tag is only supported by Netscape Navigator 3.0. If you do not specify CACHE, it defaults to TRUE. VOLUME=value VOLUME is an optional parameter. Possible values are 0 through 256. A setting of 0 effectively mutes the audio; a setting of 256 is maximum volume. This option is not appropriate for QuickTime VR Objects or Panoramas. If you do not specify VOLUME, it defaults to 256. SCALE=value SCALE is an optional parameter. Possible values are TOFIT, ASPECT, or a number. If TOFIT, scale movie to fit the embedded box as specified by the HEIGHT and WIDTH tags. If ASPECT, scale movie to fit the embedded box but maintain the aspect ratio. If a number, scale movie by that number (e.g. 1.5). Note: Using the number scale tag with a QTVR Panorama movie can degrade the performance of the movie even on high-end systems. If you do not specify SCALE, its default value is 1. PLUGINSPAGE=url PLUGINSPAGE is an optional parameter. The PLUGINSPAGE parameter allows you to specify a URL from which the user can fetch the necessary plug-in if it is not installed. This parameter is handled by your browser. If the user's browser cannot find the plug-in when loading your page, it will warn the user and allow him or her to bring up the specified URL, from which the QuickTime plug-in can be downloaded. Important: Please set this parameter to: "http://quicktime.apple.com/" which will point to the latest version of the plug-in. This option is appropriate for both QuickTime movies and QuickTime VR Objects and Panoramas. WIDTH=size in pixels The WIDTH attribute specifies the width of the embedded document, in pixels. This option is appropriate for both QuickTime and QuickTime VR movies. The WIDTH parameter is required. Never specify a width of less than 2, as this can cause problems with browsers. If you are trying to use tiny width and height to hide the movie, use the HIDDEN tag instead, as explained below. If you don't know the width of the movie, open your movie with MoviePlayer (PLAYER.EXE on Windows 3.1 or PLAY32.EXE on Windows NT/'95) that comes with QuickTime and select "Get Info" ("Get Movie Info" under Windows) from the Movie menu. If you do not use the SCALE tag and you supply a width that is smaller than the actual width of the movie, the movie will be cropped to fit the width. If you supply a width that is greater than the width of the movie, the movie will be centered inside this width. HEIGHT=size in pixels The HEIGHT attribute specifies the height of the embedded document, in pixels. This option is appropriate for both QuickTime and QuickTime VR movies. If you want to display the movie's controller, you will need to add 24 pixels to the HEIGHT. The HEIGHT parameter is required unless you use the HIDDEN parameter (below). Never specify a height of less than 2, as this can cause problems with browsers. If you are trying to use tiny width and height to hide the movie, use the HIDDEN tag instead, as explained below. If you don't know the height of the movie, open your movie with the MoviePlayer that comes with QuickTime (PLAYER.EXE on Windows 3.1 or PLAY32.EXE on Windows NT/'95) and select "Get Info" ("Get Movie Info" under Windows) from the Movie menu. If you do not use the SCALE tag and you supply a height that is smaller than the actual height of the movie (plus 24 if you are showing the controller), the movie will be cropped to fit the height. If you supply a height that is greater than the height of the movie, the movie will be centered inside this height. HIDDEN=value HIDDEN is an optional parameter. The HIDDEN parameter controls the visibility of the movie. There are no values to supply for this parameter. If you do not supply HIDDEN, then the movie will be visible. If you supply HIDDEN, the movie is not visible on the page. This option is not appropriate for QuickTime VR Objects or Panoramas. You can use the HIDDEN setting to hide a sound-only movie. If you do not specify HIDDEN, the movie will be visible. AUTOPLAY=value AUTOPLAY is an optional parameter. When set to TRUE, the AUTOPLAY parameter causes the movie to start playing as soon as the QuickTime plug-in estimates that it will be able to play the entire movie without waiting for additional data. Acceptable values for this parameter are TRUE and FALSE. The default value of AUTOPLAY is FALSE. This option is not appropriate for QuickTime VR Objects and Panoramas. If you do not specify AUTOPLAY, the default is FALSE. CONTROLLER=value CONTROLLER is an optional parameter. The CONTROLLER parameter sets the visibility of the movie controller. Acceptable values for this parameter are TRUE and FALSE. This option is not appropriate for QuickTime VR Objects and Panoramas. If you do not specify CONTROLLER, the default is TRUE. LOOP=value LOOP is an optional parameter. When set, the LOOP parameter makes the movie play in a loop. Acceptable values for this parameter are TRUE, FALSE and PALINDROME. Setting LOOP to PALINDROME causes the movie to play alternately forwards and backwards. This option is not appropriate for QuickTime VR Objects and Panoramas. If you do not specify LOOP, the default is FALSE. PLAYEVERYFRAME=value PLAYEVERYFRAME is an optional parameter. When set, the PlayEveryFrame parameter causes the movie to play every frame even if it is necessary to play at a slower rate to do so. This parameter is particularly useful to play simple animations. Acceptable values for this parameter are TRUE and FALSE. This option is appropriate for QuickTime movies. Note: PLAYEVERYFRAME=TRUE will turn off any audio tracks your movie may have. If you do not specify PLAYEVERYFRAME, the default is FALSE. HREF=url HREF is an optional parameter. When set, the HREF parameter provides a link to another page when the movie is clicked on. This option would only be appropriate for a movie without a controller. Note: If you are using a relative pathname for the HREF then it should be relative to the location of the movie specified in the SRC= parameter. This option is not appropriate for QuickTime VR Objects and Panoramas. TARGET=frame TARGET is an optional parameter. When set, the TARGET parameter is the name of a valid frame that will be the target of a link (including _self, _top, _parent, _blank or an explicit frame name). This parameter is for use with the HREF parameter. This option is not appropriate for QuickTime VR Objects and Panoramas. PAN=integer PAN is an optional parameter. The PAN parameter allows you to specify the initial pan angle for a QuickTime VR movie. The range of values for a typical movie would be 0.0 to 360.0 degrees. This parameter has no meaning for a standard QuickTime movie. If no value for PAN is specified, the default is 0. TILT=integer TILT is an optional parameter. The TILT parameter allows you to specify the initial tilt angle for a QuickTime VR movie. The range of values for a typical movie would be -42.5 to 42.5 degrees. This parameter has no meaning for a standard QuickTime movie. If no value for TILT is specified, the default is 0. FOV=integer FOV is an optional parameter. The FOV parameter allows you to specify the initial field of view angle for a QuickTime VR movie. The range of values for a typical movie would be 5.0 to 85.0 degrees. This parameter has no meaning for a standard QuickTime movie. If no value is specified for FOV, the default is 0 (which is maximum zoom). NODE=integer NODE is an optional parameter. The NODE parameter allows you to specify the initial node for a multi-node QuickTime VR movie. If no value is specified for NODE, the default NODE and view (specified at creation time of the pano movie) is used. CORRECTION=value CORRECTION is an optional parameter. Possible values are NONE, PARTIAL, or FULL. This parameter is only appropriate for QuickTime VR objects and panoramas. If no value is specified for CORRECTION, the default correction used is FULL. For further help on setting up your QuickTime audio or video, check out The QuickTime WebMaster's Page, Tools and Techniques for Content Providers at http://quicktime.apple.com/dev/devweb.html .   Hot Tip To help you get started and to see QuickTime in action, take a look at a special web page I created to help you further understand QuickTime and its possible uses at http://junior.apk.net/~rjl/toolbox/december97.html . This month's Hot Tip is HTML Vocabulary 2.0, which you can get at http://www.calles.pp.se/nisseb/files/htmlvoc.hqx . This program   is a handy reference to the HyperText Markup Language, available when you need it and updated frequently. It contains the most widely-used HTML tags, including special characters, frames, tables, forms, stylesheets, and Netscape and Explorer additions. This is not The Beginner's Guide to the Web, nor it is The Expert's Glossary of Everything, but it has many uses. Le Colophon These are just some of the many ways you can add a bit more life to your new or existing website, and I encourage you to experiment with these tips to produce just the right look for your site. Next month in HTML Toolbox, well, you'll just have to wait and see! If you are interested, you can visit my redesigned personal website at http://junior.apk.net/~rjl/ and take a look at some of my current work. Also, if you or anyone you know is looking to have a website created or re-done, I can assist in creating an award-winning site. Contact me at rjl@apk.net to make your dreams a reality.   robert j. la follette rjl@apk.net http://junior.apk.net/~rjl/     http://www.applewizards.net/