Plug-in Helper is a tool you can use to enhance QuickTime movies for the Internet. Its main purpose is to put plug-in parameters, such as AUTOPLAY and CONTROLLER, inside a movie. When the QuickTime plug-in plays that movie, it's as if you had put the parameters in the tag.

That's handy because with HREF and QTNEXT you can specify more than one movie in a single tag. With Plug-in Helper, each movie can have its own set of plug-in parameters, so that you can set

CONTROLLER="False"

in a poster movie, for example, and

CONTROLLER="True"

in the movie it links to.

It's also nice to take some settings out of the highly visible HTML and put them inside the movie structure for privacy. For example, you can put QTNEXT1="../Secret/Next.mov" inside a movie without ever putting the URL of Next.mov in your HTML.

Most plug-in parameters for a movie can be set two different ways: in the HTML itself or using Plug-in Helper (the AUTOPLAY parameter can also be set by user preferences). What happens if a parameter is set one way in HTML and another way in Plug-in Helper?

The sequence is HTML first, Plug-in Helper second, user preferences third. The first method to set a parameter fixes its value. Any values not specified by one method can still be set later.