Shockwave, the Macromedia standard for interactive multimedia on the Web, is a compressed format that allows media files created in Macromedia Director to be downloaded quickly and played by most popular browsers.
The software that plays Shockwave movies is available as both a Netscape Navigator plugin and an ActiveX control. When you insert a Shockwave movie, Dreamweaver uses both the OBJECT tag (for the ActiveX control) and the EMBED tag (for the plugin) to get the best results in all browsers. When you make changes in the Property inspector for the movie, Dreamweaver maps your entries to the appropriate parameters for both the OBJECT and EMBED tags.
For best cross-platform results, use Macromedia Aftershock to add HTML and JavaScript wrappers to Shockwave movies. Aftershock can add a variety of features to Shockwave movies, including the ability to detect which browser and plugin versions your visitors are using, and adapt accordingly. For more information on Aftershock, see Inserting and editing Aftershock objects.
To insert a Shockwave movie:
| 1 | In the Document window, place the insertion point where you want to insert a Shockwave movie. |
| 2 | Click the Shockwave button on the Object palette. |
| 3 | In the dialog box that appears, select a movie file. |
| 4 | In the Property inspector, enter the width and height of the movie in the W and H boxes. |
| These are the only required properties. See Shockwave properties for more information on the other properties. | |
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