Shockwave and Flash Movies

Examples of Flash and Shockwave

Fishin
A Flash movie from Shockwave.com. This has sound.
This is compiled and saved as a .exe file

Men
Have a look at this small shockwave .exe file

Safari Park
A shockwave Movie produced in Director and saved as a shockwave .dcr fileThis is playing in Shockwave Player and is opened in a separate HTML page. You could also simply insert a hyperlink to it.

Redirection

If the user does not have Flash/Shockwave plugins you can set a behaviour at the start of the page to redirect the user to a page where there is no Flash/Shockwave loading.

This is by using the Check Plugins behaviour.


You can see this page at Shocflash2.htm

Flashand Shockwave Sources

First check if your system is Flash and Shockwave enabled.


Check for Flash by double clicking here
Check for Shockwave by double clicking here


If you stayed on this page you are OK. If not you can get both the plugin and player for Flash and the Shockwave player free from Macromedia's Site

 
Shockwave movie files are .dcr files produced in Director.
You need shockwave plugin installed to play it on your browser. The Shockwave Player is installed into the browser.

Flash Movie files are .swf files produced in Macromedia Flash.
You need the Flash plugin installed to play them on your browser. The Flash player is installed into your browser, but it is also available as a standalone player.

Read the text file about Flash/Shockwave

From Dreamweaver Help:


'The Flash Player is available as both a Netscape Navigator plug-in and an ActiveX control for Microsoft Internet Explorer on the PC, and it is incorporated in the latest versions of Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer.


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'Shockwave on the Web When you view shockwave or flash content the images are streamed to your browser from where they are stored on the web.

 

Exe Files

You will also meet these files embedded in .exe files. These will not stream but as long as you have Flash and Shockwave embedded in your system these will play outside Flash or Director standalone in a separate window. Flash plays in the standalone Flash Player.

How to use Shockwave

Create shockwave on pages using only small animations. If you have broadband your system will cope with large streaming shockwave files. Otherwise forget it. Therefore it is not good practice to build pages with large files built in.
.exe files are the prefered format for large shockwave files. These are destined for downloading and using on the user's own hard drive.

Enabling Flash and Shockwave in Browsers

The players are ActiveX controls in IE and Plugins in Net Navigator and need to be enabled.Internet ExplorerWindows.

In IE6 open the Internet Options dialog box in the Tools menu.

  • Select the Security tab, go to Custom Level and make sure that the "Run ActiveX controls and plug-ins" options section is enabled.Macintosh.
  • Open the Options dialog box in the Edit menu.
  • Select the Web Content tab and make sure that "Load Plug-In Objects" is selected.

Netscape Navigator

The plugins are stored into a Plugins folder in the location where the program is stored. If there isn't one you can download it from Netscape.

Banner Shockwave Example

Shockwave movies are compressed Director files. If they are small enough they will load quickly and effectively.
This unfinished shockwave file would be made available as a .dcr streaming file (8.3kb) or as a .exe file (224kb) for users to download.Banner.dcr

Banner.exe

Flash Examples
Have a look at this page where there are a lot of examples of Flash , plus ways of getting the Flash Player and plugins - Flashexamples