I am part of a group putting together a series of Chinese/English translation guide websites. We want to have audio files associated with the site to provide examples of correct pronunciation. We're a Mac based group, so the easiest way for us to do this is via Quicktime files. But, as I understand it, these are not accessible to Linux users, and we want the site open to all.

So I'm asking for advice. Are there any particular audio file formats that are compatible with Linux, Apple and Windows? I'm talking about very small files, one or two spoken words. I'd like to use something that's small enough to load quickly, and hopefully that can be directlly embedded into the page, rather than being a separate download.

Thanks in advance.

Quicktime 4 Linux

Of course ogg is available (I think this sounds the best for the size) as well as real audio.

Thanks for the link, but there's this note:

Be aware of one thing: Quicktime for Linux won't read any of the movies you download from the internet. Quicktime is a wrapper for many different kinds of compression formats. What you knew as "Quicktime 4" and now "Quicktime 5" is really a distribution of compression formats not found in previous versions of Quicktime.

What about .wav files? Are these easily used with Linux?

Yes, but wav files are around 10 times larger than when encoded as ogg or mp3