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- Pull down the Options menu and select Preferences.
- From the selection box at the top of the window that opens, choose Helper Applications.
- Now, find the row corresponding to the multimedia file format you wish to automate with a helper application, and select the radio button corresponding to the action you wish Netscape to take: save, launch helper application, or use Netscape's built-in viewer.
- If you want Netscape to open a helper application, you must click once on Browse and select an appropriate program.
Different file formats work with different programs, although almost all drawing/paint programs will read and write JPEG, GIF, and TIFF formats. GIF and JPEG formats are popular for FTP and the WWW because they are much smaller than other formats, so more of them can be stored. GIF and JPEG formats are not compressible, so it is generally a waste of effort to run a compression program on them. However, other file formats often compress by large amounts. PICT and TIFF formats work best with wordprocessing and desktop publishing programs like Microsoft Word 6.0 and Adobe Pagemaker 6.0.
Movies
Movies, as they are labelled here, consist of a series of still images, sometimes with embedded audio information, united in such a way as to produce a single playable file. MPEG and QuickTime are the two most commonly encountered movie formats on the Internet.
Sound
Files containing data used to recreate audio on a computer are called audio files and are also available in many different formats. Similar to image formats, audio files can either store a digital sampling of the sound wave (sound files, like a raster image) or contain a digital encoding of the type, shape, and timing of all the notes used in the composition (music files, like vector images).
Music software packages such as MusicProse and Finale, can also be used to compose music, but they use their own proprietary music formats.
Multimedia on the Web
Once you have the appropriate software, you have to configure your WWW browser to automatically play/display any downloaded multimedia file. This procedure varies by both platform and software, but is somewhat similar.
Helper applications are programs which can stand on their own but are referred to from within a WWW browser to enhance its capability to play/display multimedia file formats. Normally, you must tell your browser which programs to use for which file format encountered. Since Netscape Navigator is the most popular WWW browser for most computer platforms, its method of setting and using helper applications is be described below.
Netscape for Macintosh or IBM-compatible computers can be customized to automatically respond to almost any file format encountered. To do this: