A Streaming Media JukeBox - Part II: Netscape

This is the second installment in our series on streaming media. In Column51, A Streaming Media JukeBox, we showed you how to program A streaming media jukebox for Internet Explorer. This week, we'll teach you how to program a streaming media jukebox for Netscape Navigator. The advantage of streaming media over local media is that your users don't have to download and store very large media files on their client machines. Instead, you store the media files on a server and have your users buffer them directly into their viewers, without ever storing a piece of the information. We mentioned in our first installment several applications that currently use streaming media: video on demand, Internet-based training, and on-line classes. Another application we have noticed lately is film promotion by Hollywood studios, showing clips from their newly-released movies on the Internet.

The Media Player comes in two formats: an ActiveX control and a Plugin. The ActiveX control can be used only with Microsoft's Internet Explorer running on the Windows operating system. The Media Player's Plugin can be used with Netscape Navigator as well as Internet Explorer running on different operating systems than Windows. In Column 51 we showed you how to embed Microsoft's Windows Media Player in your page and how to control it with JavaScript. Embedding and controlling the Media Player's Plugin is very different, both in how you embed it in your page and in how you control it from your script. In this column we'll show you how to overcome some deficiencies in controlling the Media Player's Plugin so you will be able to create A Streaming Media JukeBox with similar capabilities to the ActiveX control version. Go ahead and play with the . The Windows Media Player's Plugin is supported only by Netscape Navigator 4.0 and up. In this part we present the PC version only. We'll present the Mac version in a later column. Please refer to our previous part to learn about the difference between audio, ASF, and ASX file formats

In this column, you'll find out:

• How to embed the Windows Media Player's Plugin in your Web page
• How to control the Media Player's Plugin by JavaScript
• How to overcome the Media Player's Plugin's deficiencies
• How to write A Streaming Media JukeBox - Netscape's Version

We also provide the full script and its zipped version.