Macromedia Shockwave

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Typical Shockwave Loading Image

Macromedia Shockwave is frequently confused with Macromedia Flash. Shockwave is Macromedia's first and prior to the advent of Flash also its most successful multimedia player. In an attempt to leverage its name recognition all Macromedia players prepended Shockwave to their names in late 1990s. Although this campaign was very successful and helped establish Shockwave Flash as a dominant multimedia plugin, it made it also more difficult to maintain Shockwave and Flash as two separate products. As of 2005 Macromedia marketed three distinct browser player plugins under the following brand names: Macromedia Authorware, Macromedia Shockwave and Macromedia Flash.

Shockwave's 3D engine is still unchallenged in its market and made Shockwave very popular with a large number of online game publishers and game players. Flash files can be played on a Shockwave player, but not vice versa. Other features not replicated by Flash include a much faster rendering engine, including hardware-accelerated 3D, direct pixel access on bitmap images, blend modes for layered display of graphic assets and support for various network protocols including Internet Relay Chat. Furthermore Shockwave's functionality can be extended with so-called Xtras. Unlike Flash, the Shockwave browser plugin is not available for Linux (or Solaris) despite very vocal lobbying efforts by the Linux community.

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Additional Information

Macromedia Shockwave: available on 54% of browsers, uses ".DCR" files, created using authoring tool named Macromedia Director, MIME type: application/x-director.
Macromedia Flash: available on 98% of browsers, uses ".SWF" files, which are created using Macromedia Flash, FreeHand, Generator, and a number of third-party tools such as OpenOffice.org, Swish and others, MIME type: application/x-shockwave-flash.

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