Section 12.5. Shockwave

12.5. Shockwave

As the Internet-ready form of movies created with Macromedia's Director, Shockwave is an older brother to Flash. Director has a longer history as a tool for developing complex interactive presentations. It began life as a program for creating CD-ROMs. But when the Web exploded onto the scene, Director quickly morphed into a Web authoring tool. As a result of its CD background, Shockwave offers complex programming possibilities, which makes it ideal for detailed interactive presentations.

Like Flash, Shockwave requires a plug-in, but unlike the Flash plug-in, this one doesn't generally come preinstalled with Web browsers. If you include Shockwave animation in your Web site, many of your visitors will need to download the Shockwave playera 2.5 MB download!

That annoying requirement is a good argument against using Shockwave for general-audience Web sites (and why it's not commonly used except for specialty Web sites like online game sites). Some of your visitorsespecially the ones that don't have cable modems or DSLmay not put in the time and effort required to allow their browsers to view your masterpiece.

Figure 12-9. FlashPaper is like PDF-lite. You can view documents produced in a program like Word directly in your Web browser, with a few helpful controls like a search box and tools for zooming in and out of the document.

But if you just can't do without Shockwave, you can insert a Shockwave movie into a Web page just as you would any multimedia format. Click where you want to insert the movie, and then choose Insert Media Shockwave (or choose Shockwave from the Media menu on the Common tab of the Insert bar). Either way, a Select File dialog box appears. Find and double-click the Shockwave movie file (look for the .dcr extension).

The Shockwave movie appears as a gray rectangle with the Shockwave logo in the center. But Dreamweaver can't automatically calculate the dimensions of Shockwave movies, so you need to type the width and height of the movie in the W and H fields of the Property inspector. Use the same dimensions you specified when creating the file in Director.

You can preview Shockwave files directly in Dreamweaver by selecting the movie and clicking Play on the Property inspector. To stop the movie, click the same button (which is now a Stop button).

You resize a Shockwave movie just like a Flash movie, as described on Section 12.1.2.1.

12.5.1. Shockwave Movie Properties

The only Shockwave movie properties you have to set by hand are the width and height of the movie. Most of the time, you won't need to bother changing the default properties. The Property inspector does, however, let you change the movie's name (a requirement for using JavaScript to control its playback), substitute a different movie, choose the movie's alignment relative to the text around it, specify a background color , select an ActiveX ID, or specify top/bottom or side/side margins. All of these options work just as they do for Flash movies (see Section 12.1.2.1).

EXTENSION ALERT
Plug-In Support at Macromedia Exchange

The Plug-In object is a simple way to embed code for plug-in files. Unfortunately, because it's designed as a generic method of adding files for any and all plug-ins, it's not pretailored for any one plug-in, such as the Real Media Player.

That's not to say that you can't add ready-to-use plug-in objects to your Web pagesyou can. If you visit Macromedia's Dreamweaver Exchange (www.macromedia.com/exchange/dreamweaver/), you can find extensions (see Section 19.2) that help you insert media in a variety of different plug-in formats. These extensions help you put the proper code in your page to make the plug-in work.

Once on the Exchange Web site, choose Rich Media from the Browse Extensions menu. You'll find extensions that help you add QuickTime, Real Video and Audio, and other plug-independent media. For example, an extension creatively named "Insert a QuickTime Movie" does just that. For more on using the Dreamweaver Exchange, see Appendix A.