Candy Day candy@healthlink.org.za
The richness not only of content, but also in how content is delivered over the Internet has moved forwards in leaps and bounds. While text information still makes up a great proportion of the content of the Internet, and is the easiest to manipulate and transfer to other media, there are applications where more complex formats can make new things possible, or sometimes they’re just nice to have! Of course you could easily clock up your phone bill astronomically and overload your PCs capacity if you fetch and install every possible Internet gizmo, but if you have a multimedia-enabled PC you could augment your use of the Internet with a few judicious downloads.
Browsers – the common interface
The nice thing about accessing the
web is that you basically only need one software application – a web browser. Having
said that, there are differences in capabilities between the browsers, and new versions
are continuously being released – of course the older versions will still work, but
an increasing number of sites will incorporate new technologies that are only supported by
later versions – so you may as well accept the fact that from time to time it is
necessary to upgrade.
If you want to take advantage of all the new web technologies, the most important step is probably to upgrade your web browser – for example version 5 of Internet Explorer already has the built in capability to handle many of the new formats. On the flip side though, a full install of IE5 is about 70Mb, and you still have to fetch the various bits which aren't included in the default package from Microsoft's web site - so if you can get hold of a copy on CD you may save yourself a lot of stress. Depending on whether you are using IE or Netscape the process for getting these plug-ins / extensions may vary, but generally you will be provided with some directions when you try and access some content in a format that your browser doesn't already recognise.
Audio & Video
Simple audio such as background sounds or music can generally be embedded in the web page, and don't require you to have anything special as long as you have a sound card and speakers set up. However recorded sound and/or video material generally results in quite big files so they are either downloaded to your PC and then played through special software, or they can be streamed from the web server. This is important, because unlike graphics and text, video and sound have a time element to them, and with this added dimension comes bigger file sizes. Streaming allows one to provide a continuous connection to the web server so you can watch and hear the material while it downloads, instead of having to wait until the whole file has been downloaded. To achieve this, compression is required - this "throws away" some of the information in order to make the file smaller, but also begins to degrade the quality of the image and sound.
Some of the most common formats for audio/video include MP3, RealMedia (rm, ram), Windows Media (ASF/ASX) and Shockwave (swf). It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the relative merits and demerits of each, but very simply MP3 is a common format for music, RealMedia is the most widely used and cross-platform tool for audio and video clips, and Shockwave is useful for interactive content.
Read more about the MP3 format ( http://help.mp3.com/help/ ), and have a look through the vast amount of music available from www.mp3.com. There are several programs that can play MP3’s, catalogue your music collection and act as a digital mixing desk. WinAmp (www.winamp.com) is one of the most popular.
Although there are many potential applications for using multimedia on the web for health, you’ll probably find sound and video used most often on news, entertainment or music based sites:
So how useful is all of this to pharmacy? At the moment, probably not that much – most of the content is mainstream media – but when it comes, at least you’ll know how to use it!
| Download Blues Since the main article may get you ready to start downloading a whole number of files off the Internet, some of them quite large, here are a few tips to help you avoid too many download blues!
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