Multimedia

How does NCSA Mosaic's multimedia support work?

Current versions of NCSA Mosaic support some types of multimedia information -- depending on file type, data retrieved over the network may be sent to external viewers, like 'xv' for images and 'ghostview' for PostScript documents.

Currently supported formats are GIF, JPEG, MPEG, Sun/NeXT audio, AIFF audio, TeX DVI, PostScript, and a couple others. Note that you must have standard viewers installed on your system to actually view information in such formats; see the list of resources used to specify which external viewers match up with which formats.

Later versions of NCSA Mosaic will have full inlined multimedia support, so the implementation in current versions is a hack and will go away as soon as we have the real multimedia support working. In the meantime, don't expect too much. (A demo of the multimedia stuff (among other things) is here.

Mosaic also has support for inlined images and bitmaps, so you can include images and bitmaps in documents and not need to use external viewers to display them.

I can't view PostScript documents located on a Gopher server!

That's right --- Gopher has its own typing system, which doesn't include a way to identify PostScript documents. Similarly, you can't view MPEG movies, listen to AIFF sound files, etc. through Gopher.

I can't view a file in format BLARGH via NCSA Mosaic!

See the answer to the previous question. If format BLARGH is one that Mosaic supports, set the appropriate X resource to point Mosaic at the appropriate viewer for that format. Otherwise, wait until later versions of NCSA Mosaic -- this will all be a lot more flexible and adaptable in the future.

(In the meantime, consider setting binary transfer mode to 'on' and transferring the file into your local directory to view with your external viewer.)

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