embedded video/audio player?

[Lynch, Jonathan]

Is there a way, or an external, for playing mpeg movies without using QT
or WMP? I apologize if this is treading over old ground - but I am still
not quite clear on this.

My understanding of Mpeg is that it basically stores a series of video
frames, except that after the first frame, the only information that is
stored for subsequent frames is pixel data for pixels that have changed.


I would think it would be fairly straight forward to be able to
constantly update an image to include the information for the next frame
in a series of frames. I am not sure what sort of frame rate you would
be able to achieve if this were done solely in transcript.

My reason for asking, is that I think it would be nice for multimedia
presentations to be able to just pop in the CD, press a button, and it
all plays. Having to worry about whether QT or WMP is installed seems
very problematical.

In the past, I have found QT to be somewhat distasteful, because every
time I played something with it, QT would set itself to be the default
media player. That is obnoxious. Default settings should be under the
user's control.

Besides, not everyone will have either QT or WMP installed.

I guess, if this were in a situation in which file size was not such an
issue, then one could convert the movie to a gif animation, and have
synched-up audio play at the same time - sounds kind of awkward though.

So - has anyone tried any sort of scheme for playing video/audio without
depending on other programs being installed on the users computer?

Thanks,

Jonathan