A Streaming Media JukeBox - Part III: Browser-Independent

This is the third 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. In Column 52, A Streaming Media JukeBox - Part II: Netscape, we presented a Netscape version. This week, we'll teach you how to program a browser-independent streaming media jukebox. 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. Refer to these previous installments for several applications that currently use streaming media.

Our browser-independent jukebox combines the ActiveX control and the plugin versions of Windows Media Player. Internet Explorer uses the embedded ActiveX control while Netscape Navigator takes advantage of the plugin. Each version supprts a set of properties, methods, and event handlers. The large commonality between these two sets enable you to control the plugin almost as much as you can control the ActiveX control. We will show you in this column how to refer to or how to set properties from both the ActiveX control and the plugin. Go ahead and play with the .

In this column we'll also present a detailed description of the Media Player's methods and Part I of its properties. We'll show you how to refer to each property from both Internet Explorer and Netscape. We'll single out those properties that are supported on one and not the other.

In this column, you'll find out:

• How to embed the Windows Media Player's ActiveX control and Plugin in your Web page
• How to control the Media Player's ActiveX control and Plugin by JavaScript
• How to use the Media Player's methods
• How to use the Media Player's Properties, A section
• How to use the Media Player's Properties, B section
• How to use the Media Player's Properties, C section
• How to use the Media Player's Properties, D section
• How to use the Media Player's Properties, E section

We also provide the full script and its zipped version.