HTML - Custom Png For Audio Clips

I'm about to embark on something I realise will probably take a while to get right. Before I begin, it'd be good to pool opinions on the best approach. I've already done some preliminary research and to be honest at the moment it's all beyond my understanding!

The goal is to create a custom player of audio and video files with custom GUI, as part of a webpage. I don't want to use Quicktime because, AFAIK, it would prohibit a custom "look".

It may be necessary to create four separate players as the following situations need to be accommodated:

1) playing a single audio file
2) playing an "album" of audio files, in sequence
3) playing a single video file
4) playing an "album" of video files, in sequence

The player GUI would feature a "screen". When playing a video, the screen would show the video. When playing an audio file, there would be a still image associated with each song which would occupy the screen.

Then below the screen would be the usual apparatus for people to control playback: a trackbar, time counter, buttons for "play", "pause" and "stop". There would also be "next" and "previous" buttons for use when playing an album - they would be disabled when playing a single audio or video.

I have a few questions...

1. Apart from Flash, I don't want my visitors to need to install any software before they can use the player. I presume this depends solely on the media formats involved?

2. What video format would you recommend? What about FLV?

3. What audio format would you recommend? Ideally I'd like to use OGG but if that would introduce complications then I'll use something else.

4. There's always going to be a download button on the player so that the visitor can download the file being played. Now I've noticed on some sites that if a video is loading (before being played), and you attempt to directly download it, sometimes the download will "fail" at the point at which the loading was halted. So if the video has only loaded 40% and you start downloading it directly, the resulting file on your harddrive will only be 40% of what it should be. It's probably due to the streamed video being downloaded to an anonymous temp folder and being left in an incomplete state which the OS then thinks is a completed download. Can anything be done to stop this happening? Perhaps hide the "download" button until the file has finished loading?

Below is a mock-up of how I'd like the player to look, so you know what I'm going for. The purple background is supposed to resemble an HTML page.



I look forward to reading people's views.

Thanks for reading this long post,
Seymour.

This may be a relatively easy answer but here we go....

HTML Code:

<a href="audio.wav">Play this wav file!</a>

The above is just a simple example but my problem is that no matter what I keep getting prompted for a download... Is there any specific reason why IE7 cannot directly access wav files or is this issue due to security settings.... Normally, in the past I haven't had an issue but at this time I am at a loss....

Any help would be appreciated...
Thanks,
Dark_Jackal

Hello,
I'm creating a site that requires the inbuilt audio player to keep streaming music between page loads. What coding options are available for this, HTML, PHP or otherwise?

Regards
Eddie

I want to be able to add a mp3 audio file of a sermon to a church website I am building. I have done searches and find a lot of "embed" code, but none of these work. Nothing shows on the web page.

What is the simplest way of doing this. I understand "embed" is not a legal word. I have tired "Object", but nothing shows using this command either.

Any help will be appreciated.

Lawrence

Hi everyone.

I am working on a project with a few friends. The site is designed for people who are illiterate and so we are looking into how we could go about having audio cues play whenever the user hovers over a button or a section of an image map.

If anyone would know of a good tutorial on how to do so in html5 it would be appreciated.