Captioning for Quicktime
Adding Quicktime Content to a Web Page

Linking to a Quicktime Movie

Linking to a Quicktime movie is simple, just create a standard HTML link to the Quicktime movie. Because the user's computer may try to open SMIL files with RealPlayer, this strategy will not work if you are using SMIL. In that case, you must link directly to a .mov file. The movie will play within the web browser, not the Quicktime Player. You cannot specify movie settings such as types of controls to display, dimensions, etc. using this method. The movie will play at the dimensions in which it was created.

View a Quicktime Sample

Embedding Quicktime

To embed a Quicktime movie into your web page, you need to use the object tag and the embed tag.

• Notice how the object tag surrounds the embed tag.
• Change the src, height, and width options to match your movie.
• The classid and codebase tell Internet Explorer what kind of media this is and where to go to install Quicktime, if it is not already installed.
• For accessibility reasons, make the controller visible by setting the controller param and attribute to true. You will need to add 16 to the height of your movie to make room for the controller.

View an embedded Quicktime movie

Opening a Quicktime Movie in the Quicktime Player

• This code allows the Quicktime movie or SMIL presentation to be opened in the Quicktime player.
• The src attribute is a movie that will display in the web page, this is usually a still frame of the movie, or even an image of something else. I suggest using a file that is typically opened by Quicktime, such as a .mov or .qti (Quicktime image), so another program doesn't try to open it instead. Typically you would use Quicktime Pro to export a still image of your video footage.
• As soon as the Quicktime plugin loads the src movie, the autohref attribute tells it to automatically open the movie found in the href attribute in the Quicktime player. You must include the src, autohref, href, and target attributes for this to work.
• The size of the src movie doesn't matter. The player will expand to whatever size it needs to be to display the href movie.
• To make the href movie automatically play, you must set the autoplay option to play within Quicktime Pro. If you are pointing to a SMIL file, you can add qt:autoplay="true" to the SMIL file. Otherwise, the end user must press the play button in the stand-alone player to view the movie.
• If you don't want the Quicktime player to open until the user clicks on the embedded movie or image, remove the autohref attribute or set it to false. Using SMIL, you can create a menu of available movies from which the user can select one. When they click a particular region, the appropriate movie will open in the Quicktime player.

View a Quicktime Movie in the Quicktime Player

Another method of opening a Quicktime movie in the stand-alone Quicktime player is with .qtl (Quicktime link) files. A qtl file is an XML-based file that opens in Quicktime player and tells the Quicktime player to play a particular file. Create a text file and add the following, changing the src attribute of the embed tag to match your .mov file or .smil file.

Save the file with a .qtl file extension. Save the file on your web server and create a link to the file.

• You can link to both SMIL and .mov files. In fact, you can link to any file that Quicktime can play.
• This method only works if Quicktime player version 5 or newer is installed.
• Only absolute paths (starting with http://) can be used in the .qtl file.
• Don't forget the trailing slash in the embed tag. This is XML, not HTML.
• Most web servers are not yet set up to associate .qtl files with the Quicktime player. To fix this, add the following MIME type to your web server - .qtl = application/quicktimeplayer

View a Quicktime movie using a Quicktime link

Embedding SMIL

Quicktime movies can also be embedded directly into a web page. By embedding a SMIL, you can control the way multimedia content is displayed on the web. It is usually recommended that developers allow the media to open in the stand-alone media player because the controls are much more accessible using a screen reader or keyboard than the controls for embedded media.

• If you want to embed a SMIL presentation into your web page, use the previous code as a guide.
• For accessibility reasons, be sure to set the controller parameter to "true".
• SMIL is only supported by Quicktime version 4.1 or newer.
• Make sure that your dimensions are the same as what is specified in your SMIL document. Add 16 to the height to make room for the controller.

See embedded SMIL in action