How to Play Video Clips in a Web Browser
By Dan Pacheco
WashingtonPost.com
With a Web video tool, you can pull up a famous clip from a presidential debate, television show or other event.
The two most common video formats are Apple's QuickTime and Microsoft's AVI. Just click on your computer model under the video tool you require in the tool box to the right.
Which Tool Should I Use?
QuickTime videos are used most frequently, but many sites — especially those designed with Windows users in mind — provide only AVI. If you install both tools, you'll cover all your bases. You can usually tell what format a video is in on a Web page by looking for the extension, the three letters at the end of the file name. The extension for QuickTime is (.mov). The extension for AVI is (.avi).
How Do I Recognize a Video Clip on WashingtonPost.com?
On WashingtonPost.com, any link to a video clip is preceded by a film icon. For example:
 See a video of a glowing pumpkin (QuickTime, 51K)
The information in parentheses tell you what kind of video it is (QuickTime or AVI) and how large it is in kilobytes (K). Videos we produce will always be well under 300K to be accessible with modems, but links to videos from other sites may be longer.
QuickTime for:
 Windows 95
Windows 3.1
Macintosh
AVI tool for:
Windows 95
Windows 3.1
Macintosh
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