HOW can I pay the audio and video parts of a World Wide Web document on the Internet. I have an old SoundBlaster version 2.0 card and an ET4000 super VGA card. Also, how can I save the pictures in a Web document? I can save the document, but the pictures seem to be missing when I retrieve it. ZARINO TONG Hong Kong There is no definitive answer to your first question. Whether or not you can play audio-visual files depends on whether your Web browser is configured to launch the appropriate viewer or player for the type of file you are downloading. Most browsers can be configured to launch a viewing application for multimedia files. How you configure this depends on which browser you use. Your SoundBlaster system should have the software that will play sound files off the Internet. If you have a video card such as a VideoBlaster, it will probably come with software that will allow you to view video files off the Net. However, you still have to configure your Web browser to launch this software when it needs it. If you are using the Netscape Web browser, go to Options from the main menu bar and select Preferences. Click on the down arrow next to the first drop-down menu box and choose Helper Applications. In there you will find a list of file types from which you can take your pick. For example, if you want to play AVI files, select AVI, or MPEG for MPEG files, and so on. Then in the Actions box on the same screen, you have to tell Netscape what to do with the file. If you select Save, the file will be saved to disk for you to use later. If you select Launch Application, you will need to provide Netscape with the full path of the application you wish to launch. It will then do so and you can play your sound of video files. Standalone pictures you can access through Web documents tend to be in formats such as .GIF or JPEG files and can be saved as such - unless, of course, they are 'in-line' images. An in-line image is one that is built into the document itself and cannot be separated from it in the way of standalone images that Web links point to. When you save an HTML document, it will not save the in-line image but just a pointer to the image. Most often, a screen dump is the quick and dirty way to save an image with a document. If you want to save the image alone, there is a little trick you can use. With Netscape, open the page you want, then go to View in the main menu and select Source. This will display the HTML source code for the page that is open. Within that code, you will find the HTML code of the file containing the in-line image. Look for filenames ending with .GIF or .JPG which will be the complete URL pointing to the in-line image. Using that URL, you can open the image as a standalone and then save it to your disk. Reader Kristian Murfitt has written in with some additional pointers that could help solve the memory problem faced by W. Y. Ng I wrote about in this column last week. Mr Murfitt suggests anyone short of conventional try a program that comes 'free' with Stacker version 4.0 on CD-ROM. Called Multimedia Cloaking, the program is made by Helix Software and replaces the mouse driver, Smartdrive cache and CD-ROM driver with smaller copies of its own drivers, leaving the user with more memory. 'It should be noted that there is at least one piece of games software [that I installed on a friend's computer] with which it will not run, so if [Mr Ng] has DOS 6.x he should also perhaps consider making a multi-config rather than a boot disk,' Mr Murfitt wrote. 'It is quite well documented, even with MS-DOS on-line help.' A final possibility if the problem persists it to try loading the largest drivers first or at least the mouse driver in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file since that starts off big but actually is smaller after loading. Send your questions to Tech Talk, Technology Post, G. P. O. Box 47, Hong Kong, or fax them to 2811-1278.
