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FLASH, VIDEO & AUDIO

  • How to add Flash movies into your site
  • How to add video and audio to your site
  • HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements

Flash is a very popular technology used to add animations, video, and audio to websites. This chapter begins by looking at how to use it in your web pages.

We then focus on how to add video and audio to your site, using either the new HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements or a hosted service (such as YouTube or SoundCloud). In this chapter you will learn:

  • How to use Flash in your web pages
  • How to use HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements
  • When to host your own video and audio and when to use a service such as YouTube

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HOW FLASH WORKS

Since the late 1990s, Flash has been a very popular tool for creating animations, and later for playing audio and video in websites.

Whether you are creating an animation or a media player in Flash, the files you put on your website are referred to as Flash movies.

If you want to create your own Flash movie, you need to purchase the Flash authoring environment from Adobe.

There are, however, several companies that offer Flash animations and slideshows, as well as video and audio players that you can use without purchasing this tool.

When you create a Flash file in the Flash authoring environment, it is saved with the .fla file extension. In order to use this file on a web page it has to be saved in a different format known ...

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