Putting the HREF and TARGET Parameters to Work

Click on Pictures to "Activate" QTVR Movies
Also Known as QuickTime Poster Movies

The QTVR pano movies I am using in this tutorial are about as small as I can get them with acceptable quality. Even so, they are around 100K each, which can make people viewing my web site with low bandwidth quite impatient if they have to wait for several 100K files to download to their computers. To keep the wait down, I try not to put more than one QTVR movie on a page. A compromise to putting more than one QTVR movie on a single page is to present your viewers with single-frame QuickTime movies that show what the QTVR movies look like when it first opens. These "thumbnail" movies can have fairly small file sizes, around 10K for the ones on this page, so you can afford to put several on a single page. (This is very close to what Apple calls QuickTime Poster Movies, except QTVR Panoramas do not have movie frames you can extract for a poster movie.) You can write your EMBED tags so that when a viewer clicks on the QuickTime "thumbnail" movie, the QTVR movie loads into the same window. Give it a try:

Click on Picture to Activate the QTVR Movie

" value="">

Click on Picture to Activate the QTVR Movie

The EMBED Tag for "Click to Activate" Movies

The two movies above start out as a single frame QuickTime movie, compressed using Photo-JPEG set at Low. They are only about 10K each, and load quite quickly. When someone decides to see the whole panorama, clicking on the QuickTime movie will cause the QTVR movie to load in its place. Here is the EMBED tag that lets this happen:

<EMBED SRC="Movies/UT-WashThm.mov" HEIGHT=240 WIDTH=320 CONTROLLER=FALSE HREF="UT-Wash.mov" TARGET="myself"></EMBED>

SRC="Movies/UT-WashThm.mov" loads the "thumbnail" of the QTVR movie. Notice the relative addressing!

CONTROLLER=FALSE is required because TRUE is the default for regular QuickTime Movies.

When you click on the QuickTime movie HREF="UT-Wash.mov" tells the browser to load the VR movie, "UT-Wash.mov", that is in the same folder as the thumbnail movie, "UT-WashThm.mov". Notice!: Here the relative addressing is relative to the location of the movie you are clicking on, not the HTML file!

TARGET="myself" tells the browser where to load the new movie. It usually refers to a frame, if you are doing HTML frames, but it works a little differently here because of the value it is given, "myself." The value "myself" is an undocumented value that means, "put me in the same window as the one you just clicked on." You heard it here first!

Making a ~10K "Thumbnail" Movie

So where do you get the 10K one-frame QuickTime movie that serves as the "thumbnail"? You can use the QuickTime Pro version of MoviePlayer to make one. Here's how:

  1. Open the QTVR Pano in MoviePlayer and take a screen shot of it. On Macs this is done by pressing Shift-Cmd-3. A PICT of the whole computer screen gets written to the harddrive with a name like "Picture 1". (Acually, I used a shareware program called Screen Snapz that gives me a little more control.)
Cropping the screen shot

Cropping the Screen Shot

  1. Next, open the screen shot in a graphics program (such as Photoshop or Graphic Converter) and crop out the opening scene of your QTVR Panorama. Don't include the border around the movie, the controller bar, or the title bar.
  1. Open MoviePlayer again and selected "Import..." from the "File" menu. After selecting your cropped screen shot, click on the "Convert..." button.
  1. A new dialogue box will appear. Click on the "Options..." button.
  1. The "Compression Settings" window appears. Select a compression setting that will give you a small file size for the thumbnail movie. "Photo-JPEG" at the "Low" quality setting is a good choice. Click on "OK".
  2. Finally, make sure you have given the movie an appropriate name and click on "Save." This is your thumbnail movie for a "click to activate" QTVR movie.
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