Legend:

Explanation:

<object ...>... </object> — An ActiveX control is being embedded here, to enable playback by Internet Explorer. Requires CLASSID, height, width, and src parameters.

<embed ...></embed> — Here a Netscape plugin is being called. As this is inside the object tag, Internet Explorer will safely ignore it. IE 5.5 or newer will ignore it anywhere anyway, but earlier versions would display two copies, had you put this outside the object tag. Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, etc. will all ignore the object tag, and use only the embed tag, which does not require quoting the arguments, unless they contain special characters such as spaces. Note: single tag, doesn't really need to be closed.

CLASSID="..." — This specifies what filetype will be loaded here, and accordingly what application should handle it. This is the same code used in the Windows registry. The value must be copied literally.

width="...", height="..." — You need to tell the browser what area to reserve for the display of this object. You should specify the actual size of the object, or you can get weird display problems. For Quicktime movies, the controller is 16 pixels high, which you add to the size of your movie clip (normally 320x240 pixels).

CODEBASE="..." — This object-parameter tells IE where to get the ActiveX control, if the user doesn't have it installed in his browser yet. Installs it on the fly, if the user permits it.

pluginspage="..." — Tells Netscape-compatible browsers where to take the user, if he doesn't have the right plugin installed, and chooses the "Get Plugin" option.

<param name="..." value="..."> — All parameters could be included in the main object tag, but for readability it is recommended to supply additional parameters via these param tags and their name-value pairs. Quoting the arguments is necessary!

src="..." — This is the URL to the source file for this object, under normal circumstances, i.e. for most types of plugins/ActiveX controls. For Quicktime, things are a little different. For the embed part, the file extension here determines the MIMEtype used by the webserver, and hence tells Netscape-compatible browsers what plugin to launch (the Quicktime player). Thus you need a little file (can be empty) with the .mov extension on your webserver (same directory as this webpage) that you reference here. The browser downloads this file, starts the Quicktime player, and passes the embed-info on to it. The player looks only at the qtsrc parameter to load the actual movie clip. For IE (i.e. in the object tag), this parameter is ignored, if there is a qtsrc parameter at all. Otherwise the src parameter will be used by IE to find the movie clip.

qtsrc="..." — This is the URL to the source file for the Quicktime player. Uses the rtsp:-protocol for streaming it from a streaming server such as the ACCC Realserver, or the http:-protocol for downloading it from a webserver.

autoplay="true"/"false" — Should the movie start playing automatically? Recommended: true (for single movies)

loop="true"/"false"— Should the movie play once or continuously? Recommended: false

controller="true"/"false" — Should the user have playback controls that allow him to stop, pause, fast forward, or mute the movie? Recommended: true

There are additional parameters for the Quicktime plugin. For more information, please visit the Apple Quicktime site, which has lots of documentation and samples.

This sample in action:

Note: there are other techniques for embedding a Quicktime movie. A commonly used method requires that you save the first frame of a movie as a separate movie (with .mov extension), put that on your webserver and call it in the src parameter, as a so-called poster movie. Instead of having a qtsrc parameter, you can then use an href parameter pointing to the actual media clip. This requires the user to click on the poster movie to play back the actual clip.

To embed multiple Quicktime movies on a page, see the Apple documentation  for this topic. Particularly recommended is the technique using text/image links to reference the Quicktime player in a movie frame.