What is Shockwave?
Shockwave is the sound and multimedia format of Macromedia. On the Internet you will mostly find files that are made with “Director”, a very powerful multimedia authoring program. Unfortunately, the browser add-on that is required to view “Director movies” is rather big – so, it takes a while to download and install it, but you will be rewarded with a number of very aesthetic and entertaining Internet sites that use Director. Another up and comming Shockwave authoring program is “Flash”. Flash is one of the first Internet animation programs that’s vector based. This opens up the possibility to create full-screen animation with high quality graphics and pictures. If you haven’t seen our Multimedia-Show yet, you should do that now to experience the power of Flash! As opposed to Director, Flash’s browser add-on is rather small (170 Kbytes).
A. Shockwave refers to multimedia files created in Macromedia’s Director program. Shockwave files (which are very similar to Macromedia Flash files) are basically little, interactive movies that can be played on your computer. There are two types of Shockwave files: executable and browser. The executable Shockwave files are basically stand-alone programs (called projectors), while browser-shockwave run are imbedded in web pages and require a browser plug-in to function(a plug-in adds enhanced capabilities to your web browser).
