Where to Find Multimedia on the World Wide Web

By Joanna Pearlstein

The Web is where you'll find sound, video, animation, and graphics files online. The downside is the download: Waiting for multimedia can be a slow-motion process.

The World Wide Web. Even the name sounds like science fiction or a comic book fantasy. But it's here and now and very much for real - if you have a fast modem and a lot of patience. The Web, with its pictures, colors, buttons, and sounds, is the first user-friendly, multimedia part of the Internet. This exciting new way to explore multimedia is fairly easy to navigate. The downside is the download: Whether the Web's multimedia stuff is worth the time you spend watching your modem lights flash is an issue for you and your wallet to decide.

In many ways, using the Web is similar to using a CD-ROM title that comes on an infinite number of discs; you can access lots of different kinds of information. But with the Web, that material resides not at your desk, but on discs elsewhere - in sites all around the globe, in fact. What's not so hot is that even when using a 14.4-kbps modem (1.8K per second), the wait to get multimedia can be painfully slow. For instance, transferring a 2MB animation file can take more than 18 minutes.

A Spin Through the Web

The World Wide Web is a hypertext-based portion of the Internet originally developed by Swiss physicist Tim Berners-Lee of the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. It was designed to allow scientists to collaborate over the Internet. The Web is organized into pages; each person, company, or organization that wants to offer information creates a page and provides an address for that page. Web pages are usually linked to one another, so once you find one page, you can keep going from page to page without typing in another address. Web addresses are called URLs (Universal Resource Locator) and begin with http://, which stands for hypertext transfer protocol. If you have a connection to the Internet, you can access the Web with a piece of software called a Web browser (see the list in the box at right).

When you use the Web, you're usually accessing databases of information. You can open multimedia files with applications that come with Windows. For WAV files, try the Windows Sound Recorder. You can play AVI and FLI movie files with Microsoft's Media Player, which also comes with Windows. To view QuickTime files, you need QuickTime for Windows. You can find it and many other useful utilities in Multimedia World's forum on America Online (keyword MMWorld).

While the Web lets you view and retrieve information, it's hard to chat with others on the Web about that information. Occasionally, you will need to enter some text in a field, but generally it's only a read-and-click experience. If you're looking for interactivity, a newsgroup or bulletin board is a better bet.

Other less attractive parts of the Web experience are error and delay messages. Some of the messages you may see often are "Host contacted: waiting for reply," meaning your browser is waiting to download text and graphics, and, "Connection refused by host." The latter usually means that the site you seek is overloaded with other visitors. Your best bet is to visit another time.

What's on the Web?

In addition to being the prettiest part of the Internet, the Web is also the most commercial. At some point soon, commercial sites may offer the exciting opportunity to purchase cubic zirconium jewelry - without leaving your desk. Internet shopping is on the way, but not likely to happen much until consumers are convinced that their credit card numbers won't be Mitnicked.

Businesspeople aren't the only ones who are moving onto the Web. Because the Web is hot, everyone wants to create their own page - and those pages are of varying value. Sure, it's mildly amusing that you can find out when some guy named Brian's phone last rang (http://www.arl.wustl.edu/~brian/Office/Phone/) or see photos of people's tattoos (http://frank.mtsu.edu/~csc10004/bodmod.html). But the Web isn't entirely frivolous. You can find a treasure trove of multimedia content, shareware, and utilities out there.

Your first stop should be Yahoo, a compilation of Web sites organized by category (http://www.yahoo.com) whose value is hard to underestimate. Run by two Stanford Ph.D. students, Yahoo works as a great front end to the Internet. At this writing, Yahoo referenced almost 32,000 Web pages, divided into categories including Art, Computers, Education, Entertainment, Government, Law, News, Politics, Science, and Society and Culture. In Yahoo's Computers/Multimedia area, you'll find movies, demos, sounds, shareware, morphs, and graphics.

Stop two on the Web tour should be the Global Network Navigator, the site of publisher O'Reilly & Associates (http://gnn.com). While GNN lacks the breadth of Yahoo's links, it has lots of good resources of its own - personal finance, sports, travel, Internet information and links, an area called the Best of the Web, and information about which publications currently have Web sites.

A Trip to the Movies

Yes, there are fun animations on the Web. But most often, the files take a long time to transfer. Also, as with much of the material available on the Internet, keep in mind that using it may violate copyright laws. To be safe, don't incorporate anything you uncover on the Web into a file for commercial use until you've checked its legality.

GNN's Digital Drive In (http://gnn.com/gnn/special/drivein/index.html) contains lots of links and resources for mediaphiles. If you'd like to compare your media efforts to those of Hawaiian students, GNN will link you to movies made at Honolulu Community College. Another noteworthy site is http://www.acm.uiuc.edu:80/rml, where you'll see a variety of links to multimedia Web and Gopher sites. There are lots of QuickTime movie clips at http://www.sony.com/Music/VideoStuff/VideoClips/VideoClips.html.

"Star Trek" fans will likely enjoy Paramount's Star Trek Voyager site (http://voyager.paramount.com/), and "Seinfeld" fans must explore http://www.ifi.uio.no:80/~rubens.seinfeld. "Melrose" Placemats should check out http://wwwcip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/tree/misc/melrose, which has an episode guide, clips, and music samples.

Silicon Graphics's Serious Fun page (http://www.sgi.com/Fun/fun.html) has interesting images, movies, and, of course, information about SGI machines. You'll find clips from Pink Floyd: The Wall, Blade Runner, and Highlander at http://wwwzenger.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/persons/paula/mpeg/index.html.

Pictures at an Exhibition

Downloading graphics is sometimes less painful than getting animations, since the files are often smaller. Photos, fractals, flags, felines and other animals, and fine art await at http://www.yahoo.com/Computers/Multimedia/Pictures/. You can read biographies and browse images by computer artists at http://sunsite.unc.edu/otis/ftp/HTML/Gallery/graphic.html.

If you're a fine-arts buff you'll see Renoir pieces at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~kroupa/fine-art.html, or locate the Vermeer painting that's nearest you at http://www.ccsf.caltech.edu/~roy/vermeer/. You'll find Baroque, Restoration, Impressionist, and modern art at LeWeb Louvre (http://mistral.enst.fr./louvre/). For more unusual graphics, visit http://edcwww.cr.usgs.gov/dclass/dclass.html, where you can peruse declassified intelligence satellite photos.

A Night at the Opera

Yahoo's sound area (http://www.yahoo.com/Computers/Multimedia/Sound/) has lots of links to good sound and music pages, including ones for university songs, cybermusic, spoken poetry, and MIDI sounds. Vince's Voice Library's sound bites (http://web.msu.edu/vincent/index.html) range from Richard Nixon's farewell speech, to John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech, to clips from Amelia Earhart.

You can snatch classical music in MIDI format from the Classical MIDI archives (http://www.hk.net/- ~prs/ midi.html). This is a great place to get MIDI files of common pieces of classical music from composers including Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, and Vivaldi.

Currently under construction is the page for MuSIG, the music special-interest group run from Stanford, California (http://www.woodwind.com/MuSIG/Resources.html). The group discusses issues related to computers and music, and the page has areas for resources and a help desk. The MIDI Farm (http://www.primenet.com/~midifrm/) includes links to multimedia hardware and software vendors, including Creative Labs, eMagic, Twelve Tone, CuBase, Opcode Systems, Passport Designs, and Turtle Beach Systems. Music fans should also explore the music section of Yahoo's Entertainment page, where you can get information and files for just about every type of music (http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo/Entertainment/Music/). If you're a world music fan, one particularly interesting stop is http://www.unik.no/~robert/mizik/mizik.html. In the Internet Underground Music Archive, you can find information about bands and search a music database by artist, location, or genre.

In between your searches for multimedia, check out the Useless Pages page (http:// www.primus.com:80/staff/paulp/useless.html). This is one of my favorite sites, and it's where I unearthed some of the dumb pages mentioned at the beginning of this article. You might try Netscape Communication's What's Cool page (http://home.mcom.com/home/whats-cool.html), though it's a little too commercial for me. You can visit the White House's beautiful page at http://www.whitehouse.gov/.

Getting the Most From the Web

If you don't have Internet access via a university or corporation, you'll need a SLIP (serial line Internet protocol) or PPP (point-to-point protocol) account to access the Web. With a SLIP or PPP account, you use your modem and some software to connect to a service provider, a regionally based, or at times, national company that lets you tap into its network.

If you seek one of these accounts (and either will suffice, though PPP is becoming more common due to its technical superiority), shop around. Prices for accounts range widely: I found setup fees between $25 and $75, and monthly fees between $5 and $150. If you plan to spend a lot of time online, go with a provider that doesn't charge an hourly fee. To find a provider, check a local computer magazine or ask your user group.

The Web's resources and flexibility are numerous, but it's also slow and addictive. For premium Web viewing, get the fastest modem you can afford (14.4 kbps at minimum, but 28.8 kbps is better), and a service provider that can support that speed and doesn't charge by the hour. Finally, give up your hobbies and ambitions of learning the saxophone. Once you've spun a Web, you won't want to leave it.

Joanna Pearlstein, an assistant editor at Macworld, is looking forward to a Web page that will show the fog level in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

Web Browsers

There are four main things you need before you can get to the Web: a PC, a modem, an Internet connection (provided by your employer or through an Internet service provider), and a Web browser. A Web browser does one primary thing: it reads HTML (hypertext markup language) files. HTML is the language of the World Wide Web. Often, you can also use Web browsers to access other parts of the Internet, like File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites, where you can transfer files; gopher sites, another way to browse the net; newsgroups, essentially chat groups built around special interests; and WAIS (wide area information search). For example, if you'd like to access an FTP site from a Web browser, simply type ftp:// and then the FTP site's address. Knowing the address is the tough part.

Most Web browsers come preconfigured for work with a particular site, (usually that of the company or organization that developed the browser). To move to another site, simply enter the URL, or universal resource locator - really, the address - of the site. If you find a site you like, you can add it to a list of URLs, sometimes called a hot list, stored by the application. You can revisit a favorite site by selecting it from the hot list in a browser.

The Web is associated with graphics, but you can get a text-only browser. The main benefit of such a browser is that you don't see the graphics on the pages - so you get information faster. Since graphics make the Web fun, I haven't discussed text-only browsers here. If you do seek one, you can find Lynx, which is a helpful DOS-based text browser, at ftp://ftp2.cc.ukans.edu/pub/DosLynx/readme.htm. For information about all Web browsers, go to http://www.yahoo.com/Computers/World_Wide_Web/Browsers/.

The ideal Web browser should be speedy, reliable, and flexible. You should be able to turn off graphics if you don't want to see them and to speed up your searches; you should be able to export your hot list so you can share it with your friends, and you should be able to store the addresses of 100 or more sites. Many browsers let you designate helper applications, or applications that should be launched to display a graphic or play a movie or sound. A Web browser should be able not only to access Web sites, but also communicate with FTP sites, gopher sites, newsgroups, and WAIS databases. Finally, the browser should be able to display code, meaning that the user can view the HTML codes for the page. With these criteria in mind, I trekked through the Web to find the best browser. The winner? Netscape Communications' Netscape Navigator.

Current net statistics (available at http://www.yahoo.com/computers/world_wide_web/Browsersbrowser_usage) show that between 69 and 83 percent of Web users are using Netscape. Of course, Netscape's market share is helped by the fact that the company gives the product away in a sort of commercial shareware method. But its popularity is well-deserved. The product is reliable, fairly speedy, and easy to use. It doesn't limit the number of bookmarks you can have, and you can designate helper applications in the Preferences area. All in all, it's a stable browser worth your attention.

Web Travel Tips

1     Take pictures. If you find a site that seems useful, mark it in your Web browser.

2     If the road looks like it could be a long path to a dead-end, turn around ASAP. If you go to a Web page and your browser tells you that 8K of 746K has been read after several minutes, get out now. Whatever it is that lies at the end of the road, the journey may not be worth the cost.

3     Don't travel at rush hour. If you're attempting connections only to be told, "Connection refused by host," try connecting at a different hour. Sites get bogged down and popular ones may be unavailable at peak traveling times.

4     Read a book on the bus. Because graphics files take a long time to transfer, multitask. If you can't do something else on the Web while downloading, you can at least write a letter to your mother.

5     Be nice to the natives. The Internet is a worldwide service and you may find misspellings or grammatical errors. Cherish the net's diversity: Don't fire off a flaming E-mail to the page's owner.

6     No flash photography, please. Much of the material found on the net is copyrighted, but you can borrow it for personal use. Just don't think about sliding that clip from Psycho into your company video.

7     Watch out for pickpockets. Like your wallet, the net isn't secure from thieves. Don't provide your credit card number to anyone online, no matter what.

8     Read your Berlitz carefully. If you're typing in URLs yourself (rather than copying them from another source), double-check the spelling before you run off to the wrong place.

9     Check with the consulate to find out about where you're going. Reading Frequently Asked Questions documents (FAQs, pronounced facts) will help you understand net culture and provide background information. To avoid being spat upon, read the FAQs before you send ten questions to the administrator of a Web page.

10     Pack well. Get all the helper apps you think you might need for your Web browser before you get to a site that asks for one. There's nothing more frustrating than seeing a file you can't get because you don't have the helper app.

11     Avoid jet lag. Traveling to a new place can upset your sense of time. If you pay for your Internet connection hourly, make sure you're not piling up big bills that you can't afford.