video clips

what format is the clip?

I suppose if you wanted a picture first you could use a Javascript onmouseover to work it. or use flash.
would the picture and video be in the main window or new window?

the picture would be on a page, when you click it the video starts., whats the best format to have these clips?

mpg or avi would be my guess... anything but real media works...

ok well how do i get it on my site?

You could try the tutorials at WebMonkey. They are normally very easy to follow and should cover what you want to do.

It is really hard to find good information about embedding video and what type of format to use etc. etc. I actually did a search for you last night and didn't come up with anything good - the best page was a 1996 webmonkey tutorial!

The code to embed video is the tag - any good html reference will give you all the atttributes for it. In a basic case you'd just go like this:

You can embed a windows media player or a real player if you want but I don't know the code for that.

Another good option is Flash MX - that would enable you to do exactly what you want to do above. You could just add an autostart="false" attribute to the embed tag, but that wouldn't allow you to show a picture first. Flash MX can do that.

Ack, I'm looking around at a couple of referneces and can't find the embed tag in any of them. Maybe threre's a nother way you're supposed to do it, but I don't know what that is - the embed tag does work though.

Here's a page from HTML goodies with some more help:

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/tutors/videoembed.html

After doing some reading at w3c.org, it seems that the embed tag is depreciated/obsolete because it was proprietary. They suggest using the object tag (this might not work in NS4 - we have some older pages at work that have embedded smil using the object tag, but we've provided an alternative using the tag for NS... I didn't code it so I'm not entirely sure how it works).

Here's w3schools.org page on the object tag:

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_object.asp

I think the classid is used to define which plugin to use but I'm not sure on that one...

Sorry that I haven't been of more help here, it's a little tricky when there are so few resources available on the subject.

I am assuming that you understand that it's *much* easier to just link to a video file for people to download... download speeds are a major problem with video of course.

ok say i just want to put a link to it, how will i go about doing that? a hyperlink to where? where it is on my server directory?

where did you upload it to?

Just put a link to the file, wherever it is on your serve (put it anywhere you like) just with an like you would to an html file or whatever. Then tell people to right click and "save target as" (check this in different browsers to make sure the instructions are right... I forget what it is exactly in Netscape). Then they'll just download the video and watch it from their own computers. MPEG is the best format for this - it's not proprietary so they will work in most video players. Pretty much everyone should have something that is capable of playing an MPEG.

Just to add to that - I don't know what your video is for, but you might want to check around at sites on similar topics and see what they're doing. Your target audience may be familiar with a particular way of handling videos.

ok thanks