4.c. insérer des sons et des séquences vidéo (Hot Potatoes 5)

It's increasingly common to add sound and video to Web pages, and this is especially appropriate in the case of educational materials. Adding sound or video to your pages is basically no different from adding a link to a file; sound files and video files are no different from other files. Here are some basic guidelines, and a couple of example scenarios.

First, create your media files...

Hot Potatoes does not contain any tools for creating or editing sound or video files. For this, you will need to find other software programs. Most modern sound cards can be used for recording or capturing sound on disk, but you may need to get some special software with which to edit it. Video is a little more complicated, since you may need a video card which has video capture capabilities, and not all video cards can do this.

Linking to a simple sound file

Let's imagine that you have a sound file called listen.wav. (WAV files are a common sound file format, usually created on Windows, and used for short sound segments.) The file is sitting in the same folder as your JBC exercise. You would like your students to be able to listen to this file before they answer Question 1 of your JBC quiz. Here's what you do:

1. Make sure you have saved your JBC exercise.

2. Click in the Question field of Question 1 in JBC.

3. Click on Insert / Link / Link to Local File.

4. If a message appears, read it and make sure you understand it, then press OK to bring up the Open File dialog box.

5. Find your sound file and select it, then press Open. You will now see the Insert Link dialog box.

6. In the case of a sound file, you probably should not specify a Target attribute -- leave this box blank.

7. In the Link Text box, type an appropriate piece of text, such as "Click here to listen to the text".

8. Press OK.

Now, when you compile your Web page, you should see a link in Question 1. Clicking on the link will play the sound file. Note that how the file is played (what application is used to play it) really depends on the user's browser. Sometimes QuickTime will pop up, sometimes the Windows Media Player, and sometimes another application; it all depends on what is installed on the user's machine, and you have no control over that. However, something should always appear which can play the file, as long as the user's computer is able to handle sound.

There are several other types of sound files that you can use; among other popular types is RealAudio, which is played by a free plug-in. RealAudio files are very compressed, and can be much smaller than WAV files. You can encode your own sound files in RealAudio format using a free encoder -- see the RealAudio Website for more information:

    http://www.real.com

Linking to a video file

Linking to a video file is really no different from linking to a sound file. Just follow the steps above, but select a video file instead of a sound file. However, you should note that, in order to view the video, your user's computer must be able to handle the specific video format you have chosen. It's a good idea to do extensive testing on various types of machine to make sure that your video is in a format which the user can play. If you're using a format such as RealVideo, you might want to include a link on the page so that users can download and install the RealVideo plug-in if necessary.

Martin Holmes, Half-Baked Software and the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre, 1998-2001.