You can add video to your Web page in different ways and using different formats. Video can be downloaded to the user or it can be streamed so that it plays while it is downloading. The most common streaming formats available on the Web for the transmission of video files are RealMedia, QuickTime, and Windows Media. You must download a helper application in order to view these formats. With these formats, you can stream audio and video simultaneously.

If you'd like to include a short clip that can be downloaded rather than streamed, you can link to the clip or embed it in your page. These clips are often in the AVI or MPEG file format.

You can use Director to create Shockwave movies or Flash to create interactive, low-bandwidth, multimedia presentations for the Web. With Flash, file size is surprisingly small, and the technology works across many platforms. (Of course, users must first download the free player plug-in before they can view these files.) In the following sections, we'll focus on adding Shockwave and Flash files to your documents using Dreamweaver 4.