Using video in your Web pages

Video and animations are two of the most dramatic and eye-catching elements that you can include in your Web documents.

The two most common formats used on the Web are:

Quicktime: Quicktime is a format, originally developed for the Macintosh, which allows users to view and edit video, animation, sound, text, music, and other dynamic information. From a technical point of view, Quicktime supports two kinds of files: image files and time-based movie files.
MPEG (Moving Picture Expert Group): MPEG is a standard for digital video (sequences of images in time) and audio compression. MPEG is expected to become the industry standard for delivery of interactive television. QuickTime also supports MPEG compressed video.

As usual with Web documents, the format used is specified via the file name extension. For Quicktime, use .qt or .mov as the extension. For MPEG, use .mpg or mpe as the file name extension.

Some Video Examples

The following Quicktime video was made with a black-and-white digital video camera called QuickCam, made by Connectix.

Kelly's ad, in Quicktime format.

This short clip is only about 8 seconds long, but takes up 880K of disk space. If it was color, the clip would take up even more space. This should drive home the point that video storage requires large amounts of disk space.

Kelly's ad, in MPEG format.

We translated the clip into MPEG format, and now it only takes up about 180K. And, as you can see, we've lost both quality and sound!

In sum, if you plan to incorporate video into your Web documents, you must ensure that you have adequate disk space. In addition, you'll probably also want to have a fast server machine and a fairly high bandwidth network connection. Otherwise, Web clients trying to retrieve video documents risk having to wait a long time while the video is transfered. Worse, if it takes too long, their network connection might abort part way through the process!