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Playing QuickTime Movies on Your Webpage

By Stephen Bucaro

QuickTime is a common video format on the Internet. The QuickTime video format was developed by the Apple Computer company. QuickTime videos have the file extension .mov. Code to play a QuickTime movie can easily be added to a webpage.

Recent versions of Internet Explorer do not support the embed tag that was previously used to install Netscape-style plug-ins to play QuickTime movies. You are now required to use the W3C standard "object" element tag to load the new QuickTime ActiveX control from Apple.

The <object> Element

The code shown below uses the "object" element tag to automatically install the QuickTime ActiveX control, if it's not already installed on the users computer, and to automatically load and play a QuickTime movie.

<object classid="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" width="320" height="256"
codebase="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab">
<param name="SRC" value="chicken.mov" />
<param name="autoStart" value="true" />
<param name="loop" value="flase" />
<param name="showControls" value="true" />
</object>

The object classid attribute uniquely identifies the ActiveX control to use. It must be set to "clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" to install the QuickTime Movie Player. If the user's computer does not already have the ActiveX control installed, Internet Explorer uses the path specified in the codebase attribute to automatically download and install it.

The codebase attribute must be set to http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab". This location will always contain the latest version of the QuickTime Player.

The object element width and height attributes should match the dimensions of the movie in pixels.

The object element may have several parameter (param) elements specified. The src parameter must be set to the path of the movie file. In this case "chicken.mov", a short video clip from a public domain movie.