It is available free, but you have to look very hard on the realmedia website to find the free version. Shockwave A proprietary codec from Macromedia, the makers of Director, Flash, Dreamweaver, and other multimedia software. The common codec for video and audio on the Macintosh since forever, but increasingly dominant in the web world as a codec. Quicktime v. 3.0 is a truly multiplatform software that can be used for cross-platform content creation. If it is widely adopted in the near future, it is likely to become one of the dominant methods for compressing video and audio on the web.
Decompression is invisible, and is integrated into the system software of each platform.
For Macintosh users, this is standard, for WIndows users, it must be added as an extension to the operating system. It can also create music that is highly interactive, due to a comprehensive set of JavaScript functions. The InterVU Player provides a view of the first frame of the video right in the Web page, streams the video while downloading, and provides full-speed cached playback from your computer's hard drive. The full quality of the originally recorded audio and video is retained. In addition, the InterVU Player provides access to high-speed video delivery through the InterVU Network.