RE: Cross-platform web application in SMIL 2.0 - is it feasible?

There is a free RealOne Player, but the Real website encourages you to purchase the Plus version. RealOne is really the only decent cross-platform solution supporting SMIL 2.0. MS IE 6.0 XHTML+SMIL2 profile is interesting, but Windows only right now. I assume MS has plans to bring IE 6 to the Macintosh market, but who knows when or how compatible it will be with XHTML+SMIL2 for Windows. Quicktime has always just had minimal support for SMIL. Apple seems to be more aligned with Macromedia Flash or MPEG-4 now.

You can use the RealOne Player ActiveX/plugin to embed the SMIL presentation into a web page. 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nick de Voil [mailto:nick@devoil.com]
> Sent: Thursday, June 20, 2002 6:03 AM
> To: www-smil@w3.org
> Subject: Cross-platform web application in SMIL 2.0 - is it feasible?
> 
> 
> 
> A couple of newbie questions:
> 
> I am exploring the feasibility of enhancing an existing Java-based Web
> application so that it can serve SMIL as well as HTML. I have 
> written a
> test JSP that serves a SMIL 1.0 document, and when I access 
> the page from
> my Windows machine I can get MS Internet Explorer 6 to play it in a
> separate RealPlayer 8 window, or if I set the preferences 
> appropriately I
> can get the QuickTime 5.0.2 plugin to play it (unbearably 
> slowly) in the
> browser window. The presentation behaves differently in the 
> two different
> windows, however.
> 
> It appears that the only RealPlayer that supports SMIL 2.0 is 
> the RealOne
> player which is a commercial product. Is that right? It also 
> appears that
> QuickTime doesn't support SMIL 2.0 (yet). Will it?
> 
> What are my prospects for building a SMIL-based application 
> which I can
> reasonably expect the general public to be able to view using 
> freely and
> easily available software on their PC or Mac, without 
> insisting on them
> installing one particular plugin? Which will work consistently across
> players and at an acceptable speed on normal hardware at 
> normal connection
> speeds?
> 
> If so, is it also feasible to expect the browser to be able to run the
> SMIL presentation within the browser window, or preferably, 
> within just
> one area of it, as opposed to starting up an external application?
> 
> If not, do you think it will become feasible at some point in 
> the future?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Nick
> 
>

Received on Thursday, 20 June 2002 09:47:36 UTC