Multimedia can be used in Help systems in a variety of ways. You can add background sounds that play when topics open. You can insert links that play sound or videos when clicked. And you can insert sound and video into topic content.
The types of sound and video files that are supported in HTML include:
.AVI: Audio Video Interleave. A Windows multimedia video format from Microsoft. It interleaves standard waveform audio and digital video frames (bitmaps).
.AU: Audio File. A digital audio file format from Sun that is used on the Internet and can be played by a Java program. It is commonly used on UNIX systems and is also supported with Microsoft Windows.
.MID: Musical Instrument Digital Interface sound file (MIDI). A variation of this format is the RIFF MIDI file which uses the .RMI extension. MIDI is a standard Microsoft Windows sound format for recording and playing synthesized sounds from electronic instruments.
.WAV: The native digital audio format used with Microsoft Windows. WAV files allow different sound qualities to be recorded for high-quality output. Windows uses .WAV files for general system sounds and they also work with HTML.
.MPG: The file extension that identifies compressed audio and video files. These files use the format specified by the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG).
.MPEG: The file extension that identifies graphic image files in the format specified by the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG).
.MP3: The file extension for MPEG, audio layer 3. Layer 3 is one of three coding schemes (layer 1, layer 2 and layer 3) for the compression of audio signals. Layer 3 shrinks the original sound data from a CD without sacrificing sound quality, thus making it easy to transfer MP3 files across the Internet.
.MPE: The file extension that identifies a compressed video file.
.MOV: A file extension for a movie file in Apple's QuickTime format.
.MOOV: A file extension for a movie file in Apple's QuickTime format.
.QT: A file extension used to identify multimedia files that use the QuickTime format.