Bedtime Reading - Multimedia

Take a tour of SMIL, the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, and find out how you can use it to quickly and rapidly build Web-based multimedia offerings incorporating multiple media types.

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By: icarus, (c) Melonfire

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November 21, 2002

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Obviously, this is just the tip of the iceberg – SMIL 2.0 offers an immense amount of new functionality related to the timing and sychronization of media clips. I've just shown you the basics in this tutorial – there are many more attributes in the SMIL 2.0 specification, covering everything from animation to transition effects, and they allow you to perform some pretty advanced media manipulation using very simple XML-based constructs.

In order to find out more about SMIL's capabilities, I'd strongly suggest you spend some time at the following links:

The official SMIL 2.0 specification, at http://www.w3.org/TR/smil20/

The CWI SMIL tutorial, at http://www.cwi.nl/~media/SMIL/Tutorial/

The WebTechniques SMIL tutorial, at http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/1998/09/bouthillier/

HTML+TIME, at http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/Author/behaviors/htmltime.asp

SMIL samples, at http://www.realnetworks.com/resources/samples/smil.html

The RealOne Player, at http://www.realnetworks.com/

The W3C's SMIL effort, at http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/

In case you'd like to read more about SMIL, drop me a line...and, until next time, stay healthy!

Note: Examples are illustrative only, and are not meant for a production environment. Melonfire provides no warranties or support for the source code described in this article. YMMV!