7 - Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research

9.1 Internet Explorer (IE)
This is a graphical web browser, which enables a user to experience the hypertext,
photographs, sound, video, etc. available on the WWW. It works as part of the Windows
operating system. It has some features not available in Netscape. IE can be used on PCs
running Windows or on all Macintosh systems running System 7.
9.2 Netscape Navigator (NN)
It provides a useful web site HTML editor, allowing complex HTML to be written for you
in a WYSIWYG environment. It works as part of the Windows operating and Linux
operating system. Netscape Communicator is a suite of software applications that includes
Navigator, Messenger, Collabra, Composer, and Conference etc.
10. Audio/Video files
10.1 AUdi (.au)
AU is short for Audio, a common digital sound file format used on UNIX machines and
the standard audio file format for the Java programming language. The file has a very
simple structure, the file header specifies the basic parameters of the sound sampling rate,
sample size, number of channels and type of encoding - followed by the sound data.
10.2 WAV
The WAV file format was developed by IBM and Microsoft as the Resource Interchange
File Format WAV to store arbitrary sound data in a structured format. The format has
become the de facto standard for storing sound files on Windows machines: an operating
system which uses WAV files for basic system sounds.
10.3 Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI)
This file will store a number of aspects of the sound, including the note's pitch, length and
volume, as well as additional characteristics such as vibrato and delay time. A MIDIcompatible
computer records music as keystroke and control codes, which, when saved as
a MIDI file, can be easily manipulated by any other MIDI-compatible device. The MIDI
standard allows for musical pieces to exchanged and edited by different computers on
different platforms in a way that conventional digitised sound (actual waveforms) cannot.
10.4 Moving Picture Expert Group (MPEG)
A compression standard for video, which transfers all information of every tenth frame,
with the subsequent nine frames being transmitted only as significant changes to that
reference frame. It works on all platforms, but of lower quality. MPEG uses a type of lossy
compression that is generally imperceptible to the human eye.
10.5 Audio Video Interleave (AVI)
An AVI file plays on a PC via an application capable of parsing the AVI file header and
consecutively pulling in the video frame and accompanying audio. The video is then
decompressed and displayed in sequence with the audio sample which has been sent to the
soundcard for output. AVI is a specialization of the RIFF and it is the most popular format
for audio/video data on the PC and is widely supported in the Windows platform. AVI is
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