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Active Movie Control in Two Easy Steps
Page 3 —
Step 1: The Basics
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Hopefully, you've looked at the demo by now and you've realized how powerful the Active Movie Control can be. The truth of the matter, though, is that you can still eke out a lot of that power through very simple HTML and minimal JavaScript, if any at all. That's because there are three different ways to incorporate the Active Movie Control into your Web page (and a fourth way, the common <a href> tag, to open up the media in an external window). Perhaps the most common of the three is the embed tag. In fact, this tag didn't even come from Microsoft - Netscape originally developed embed and Microsoft just adopted it into Internet Explorer. Using the embed tag on your page should look something like this:
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<embed autostart="TRUE" loop="TRUE"
src="http://somedomain.com/somepath/tothefile/someMovie.avi">
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So, what does this all mean? Well, autostart requires a Boolean (true/false) value to determine if the media will play of their own accord, or if they require interaction from the user. A loop also requires a Boolean value to determine if the media loop back to the beginning when they reach the end, or if they just stop. Of course, src is just the pathname to the file, and you all know what that is, right?
Pretty straightforward, no?
The next way to invoke the Active Movie Control is through the image tag, oddly enough. This is specific to AVI files only, so its use is rather limited, but I figure it's a good thing to know just to impress your friends. Here's what the typical "image dynsource" tag (as it is called) should look like:
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<img start=1 loop=0
dynsrc="http://somedomain.com/somepath/tothefile/someMovie.avi">
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start and loop behave exactly like autostart and loop do in the embed tag, except that here we specify the Boolean values numerically: 1 is "true" and 0 is "false." dynsrc behaves just like src would in the embed tag - just slap in a pathname and go. Very easy. Almost ... too easy.
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