Adding Videoclips to your Web Page
By smbea (mabelle@msc.net.ph)

Years before when combining the Web and multimedia was still not possible, Web sites were static, almost bordering on the bland. One could only post pictures and graphics in .jpeg or .gif formats. Nowadays, you can take a videoclip of yourself and put it up on your Web site to immortalize yourself on cyberspace.

The major reason why Web sites didn't contain any multimedia content before was the lack of support for multimedia in most browsers. However, this changed in 1996 when the giants in the browser world such as Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator came out with upgrades of their respective browser versions along with the essential support for multimedia objects on Web pages.

If you know your basic HTML and the appropriate syntax, you can add most types of multimedia content to your Web page. To add your video clip to your Web page, you will use the tag at the appropriate location on the page:

	<embed src=[type your url here] 
	 autostart=[true|false]
	 loop=[true/false]
	 width=[no. of pixels]
	 height=[no. of pixels]
	 align=[top|bottom|center|baseline|left|right|
               texttop|middle|absmiddle|absbottom]...>

For example, you want to include in your Web page a video clip of you with the file name ME_DANCING.AVI. The first thing you'll do is upload that video clip to your server (i.e. Geocities). If you want that video clip to start automatically at its natural size, you should use this HTML code:

	<embed src="ME_DANCING.AVI" autostart=true>

If you prefer to run a thumbnail size of your video clip automatically, you'll use this HTML code instead:

	<embed src="ME_DANCING.AVI" autostart=true width=120 height=90>

However, take caution and don't get carried away with putting video clips or other multi-media objects to your Web pages. You have to remember that most multimedia data -- especially video data -- take up large spaces. Your one-minute video clip can be several megabytes in size. If your Web pages are being hosted by free Web space providers like Geocities and Tripod, then all the more you should take into consideration the amount of Web space you can only use.