RE: SMIL - IIS Server

> What this means then is that if you have created RealMedia 
> SMIL content, but an end user installed QuickTime player, the 
> QT player will try to play the .smil file (as, after all, it 
> thinks it can) - however because RealMedia SMIL and QT SMIL 
> are actually different, the "playing" fails - with no 
> apparent reason to the end user.

There are easy solutions for this - you can use a real player meta file
(.rpm) to contain a reference to the smil file - RealPlayer will play
the rpm which points it to the .smil (or .smi).  

For QT, you can create a QT reference movie to accomplish the same task
- Apple provides a free tool to do this.  The reference movie is a .mov
file that just references the .smil (or .sml - another recognized smil
file).

These both are additional steps, and I would also prefer to avoid them
also.

> This "hijacking" issue has become such a problem that I find 
> myself recommending people actual create native 
> (non-proprietary) SMIL files and importing them into FLASH to 
> create captioned Flash Files - at least then we don't have a 
> situation of dueling media players to contend with.

This is a great idea! Do you have any demos?

AWK