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Adding Movies to Web Pages

It is just as easy to put links to movies on your web pages as it was to add links to sounds and external image files.

A Simple Example

For example, get the files named simpsons-2001.mpg and rocket.mpg:

  1. For each of these files, hold the right mouse button down over the link.

  2. Select "Save Target As . . .", in the resulting dialog box.

  3. Specify to save with the default names (simpsons-2001.mpg and rocket.mpg).

  4. Select your homepage directory for the destination, and then click "Save". (These files are 308 kB and 105 kB long, respectively, so this may take a while if your link is slow.)

Then we can link to the movies by adding the following to your homepage file:

<hr>
<h2> Some Movie Files </h2>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="simpsons-2001.mpg">
Homer 2001</a>
<li>
<a href="rocket.mpg">Rocket</a>
</ul>
<hr>

Save this, point the browser to your homepage file, and reload. You should see something like the following:

Some Movie Files

In this HTML, <ul> starts an un-numbered list, </ul> ends the un-numbered list, and <li> precedes each separate member of the list. In this example we have put only two elements in the list, but we could add any number by using more <li> lines.

Adding Movie Links

Now use the preceding example as a guideline to add some more movie links to your homepage. Here are some movie resources to help you out:

Yahoo Listing of Movie Archives
http://dir.yahoo.com/computers_and_internet/software/multimedia/video/

Apple's QuickTime Movie
http://www.apple.com/quicktime

MPEG Movie Archive
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/multimedia/animation/mpeg/berkeley-mirror/movies

Remember though, that even a movie of 30 seconds duration will take many minutes to download over a typical modem connection. Thus, if you are developing Web pages intended to be used with modem-level connections, you should use movies judiciously. (As noted previously, these large file sizes are a primary motivation for streaming video, and audio, where possible.) It is also courteous to indicate the length of large files like movies, so that viewers know that they are about to initiate a download that may take some time.

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