By and large, unless radio, news, musical synthesizer or video clips are your specialty and a chosen porpose of your site, this is the most confused and confusing mess on the web. One of the most annoying things about web browsing are the blasts of unsolicited sound that many designers generously include in their pages. compatibility problems abound for many other media file types, and the other programs that are often needed to play them seem to change more often than underwear.

The main problem with embedding these files in a web document is that they often override the sound mixer balance settings of your machine and are annoying mostly for that reason. Midi files also sound radically different depending on the synthesizer that is installed in the computer, and therefore often have strange audio shortcomings. The makers of WebTV convertors are prone to encourage this to 'entertain' the couch potatoes, who of course, have little more than volume controls! Newer plugins like Liveupdate Crescendo accomplish improved control over volume for midi files, but this is user dependent. Audio files should be carefully chosen and judiciously embedded in websites only if necessary. It is best to offer the user the option of playing them, rather than forcing them to play automatically.

Video files have more formats and types of formats than you can shake a stick at, and often require a visit to a plug-in center or a new media player to get working. Two of the very best systems are the Realplayer audio and video system, and of equal stature, although video only the Apple Quicktime system.

True to form, Johnnie come lately Microsoft is aggresively trying to stamp both of them out with the buggy new 4.6.X versions of their old Media Player2 applet. CDROM publishers have further clouded the issue by uninstalling codecs that don't rightly belong to them when their software is uninstalled, creating a shell-game for Windows video multimedia. Microsoft have now also gotten into the break your computer game by releasing a bloated, vicious new Media Player 7 thingy, which will maliciously damage your Windows system registry disabling vital, basic video editing functions needed by other software should you be foolish enough to uninstall it. It provides nothing new but a way to deliver advertising with the movies (mimicking advanced RealPlayer) which has been broken for years in the older versions.

Macromedia have also emerged as a major player in the media presentation department with plugins and software to produce truly impressive and professional looking work. Their Shockwave animation player plugin is also nice for people using computer browsers, but useless for web appliances. Look for a Microsoft tangle soon. Nice as a splash page graphic, many users however, are totally unimpressed with the use of it as a whole-website language, where it is slow, unwieldly and difficult to use and navigate a website with.

Others have taken the high road and come up with a zoo of different schemes for sending sound and video files over the web, but only the Realplayer seems to offer the best overall stability, performance and usability.

Other than those above, most of these technologies are still in their adolescence, and a mature contender has yet to rise above the others with a really satisfactory solution. All of these systems require browser plugins or an endless cycle of software updates which are a pain for most users, especially when they keep changing the versions that are required. Internet video is crummy at very best, since there is and simply never will be a scheme that can squeeze an elephant through a garden hose.

Rest assured, that those who want to watch TV over their computer displays will buy a tuner card, and hook up their cable. There is no chance that the web will ever offer a file or streaming system that can hold a candle to the ultrawideband conventional broadcast or digital cable tv services especially with enhanced digital HDTV broadcasting on the horizon. In fact, it's more likely consumers will get their first tiny glimpse of true broadcast HDTV over noisy video tuner cards for PC's, who's monitors can already display these resolutions today.

Even the very best examples of internet video are a blocky, blurry, streaky, noisy, color deficient, postage stamp sized imitations of true wideband analog or digital video. Even when optical (lightwave) fiber optics are brought to your home or office a noisy computer card will still not be comparable to videophile hardware huge high resolution video displays built for the express purpose of rendering HDTV digital video.