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PC BROWSER HELPER APPLICATIONS

Here are a number of external helper applications that work with your browser to handle multimedia files such as graphics, movies, and sound files.

- G R A P H I C S -

Aladdin GhostScript

This product will allow you to view PostScript files. The Ghostscript, Ghostview, and GSview home page can be found at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/index.html. It contains everything you need to know about obtaining the files for your particular platform and configuration.

Lview Pro

Lview is a shareware Gif/Jpeg viewer/editor that works well with Mosaic. It is available for download from the NCSA FTP site at ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/PC/Windows/Mosaic/viewers/lviewp1c.zip.

- S O U N D -

PC Speaker driver

This product is a sound driver for the basic PC Speaker. It was developed by Microsoft for licensed users of Windows 3.1. After you download the speaker driver, which can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/pages/KB/softlib/mslfiles/SPEAK.EXE. you can use wplany to hear most audio files. You can download wplany from the CICA archives at ftp://ftp.cica.indiana.edu/pub/pc/win3/sounds/wplny11.zip. It plays .AU, .WAV, .VOC and some others. It works with WinMosaic, over the standard PC speaker. There have been a couple of threads in comp.infosystems.www regarding how to set up MOSAIC.INI to play .AU files. The following is an excerpt: 
[Viewers]
    (deleted)
type8="audio/basic"
    (deleted)
audio/basic="p:\mosaic\wplany.exe %ls"

[Suffixes]
    (deleted)
audio/basic=.au,.AU,.aud,.AUD

RealAudio Player

RealAudio allows you to play audio on demand without waiting for long sound file downloads. It's not quite real-time audio (the sound streams that you receive are still canned), but a number of news sites offer hourly updates. With a RealAudio Encoder, you can also create your own RealAudio sound files. In case you haven't "heard," Microsoft and Apple will be bundling RealAudio software in Windows 95 and the Mac Internet Connection Kit respectively. For more information on this technology, see the RealAudio home page at http://www.realaudio.com/ which contains a link to some demonstration sound streams, comprehensive installation and configuration instructions, as well as a link to download the software.

WHAM

WHAM (Waveform Hold And Modify) Version 1.33, is freeware and will play .au and .aiff sound files for people with Windows supported sound cards. The size of this file is 135 KB. You can download it from DEC's FTP server.

- V I D E O -

MPEGPLAY (MPEG Movie Player)

Mpegplay is shareware and seems to work well with NCSA's Mosaic and Netscape. The viewer is automatically launched when you try to view an .mpg movie file. It is available for download at ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/PC/Windows/Mosaic/viewers/mpegw32h.zip.

QuickTime VR Player

The QuickTime VR (Virtual Reality) Player is a very nifty package that allows you to experience virtual reality on your PC without specialized graphics accessories. QTVR scenes are actually assembled from a series of photographs, video stills, or computer renderings which are warped and blended together to create a single continuous panoramic image. As you "look around" a QTVR scene, the QTVR Player unwarps the image on the fly and displays your "perspective" in the viewing window. For more information, see the QuickTime VR home page which includes some stunning demos of this technology, as well as instructions on how to download and install the software.

Virtual reality is fast becoming the hottest interactive technology on the Web. Even QTVR's multi-node panoramic images, however, are only the tip of the iceberg, a sort of "virtual" virtual reality that doesn't allow any real interaction. Enter VRML--the Virtual Reality Modeling Language. While HTML describes text, VRML describes 2D and 3D objects; while Netscape allows you to browse pages, VRML browsers allow you to navigate and interact with 3D environments which can themselves contain hyperlinks to other HTML and VRML resources. The applications are manifold, and already range from "flying" through a virtual city, to "handling" 3D protein molecules. For more information, see the VRML Forum at the above link, or download one of these VRML browsers.

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