Re: gzip SMIL 3.0 content

Jack Jansen wrote:
>
> On  5-Jan-2007, at 20:14 , Jose Ramirez wrote:
>> All in an effort to make SMIL the standard in multimedia on the Web. 
>> SMIL presentations being made up of separate files, on a slow 
>> connection the files
>> may not arrive at a certain time, making the presentation 
>> ineffective. If SMIL 3.0 would add gzip, all the files could be 
>> bundled and compressed, allowing
>> small presentations on slow connections to viewed as intended. It's 
>> going to be a while before everyone has a fast connection
>> to the Web. This will help establish SMIL, by giving the option to 
>> anyone with access to an http server, they can serve the content with 
>> prefetch and caching or gzip it. One way or the other the content 
>> would appear the same as it does locally.
>
> I think gzipping is only part of the solution: it may also be needed 
> to aggregate additional media items (audio, images). The SVG document 
> you referred to talks only about compression (at least, that's all I 
> saw, I wasn't aware of this before). But the mobile phone MMS standard 
> shows a possible solution: pack the smil file plus the accompanying 
> media items into a Mime/multipart message, and come up with a naming 
> scheme to refer to the other multipart parts from within the SMIL.
>
> Putting on my SYMM WG member hat:
> 1. This should probably go into a new profile, as nothing really 
> changes in the language.
> 2. Someone writing up a proposal and submitting it to the SYMM group 
> would definitely help, going from one paragraph with what seems like a 
> good idea to a standards document requires a lot of details to be 
> fleshed out. Not only in writing the standards text but before that a 
> lot of details have to be thought about. (not only the media 
> references, already mentioned above, but also things like whether 
> things should be structured so that the presentation has to be the 
> first item so it can start before all additional items have arrived, 
> and lots of other things).
>
> --
>
> Jack Jansen, <Jack.Jansen@cwi.nl>, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack 
> <http://www.cwi.nl/%7Ejack>
>
> If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma 
> Goldman
>
>
>
MMS encapsulation would work beautifully. With SMIL 3.0 adding SMILtext, 
everything is there, free media formats jpeg, gif, Vorbis audio, Flac audio
Theora video, Dirac Video. A few plug-ins need to be made. Everything is 
in place, just getting it all presented at the right time.

I was thinking of more along the lines of creating one tar file from all 
the media files and SMIL file. Then that tar file compressed with gzip. 
Programs for doing this are freely available, I used 7-zip (7-zip.org). 
MMS would be a better solution, having all devices big and small, share 
a common SMIL container :)
Jack with the crazy patent system we have today, one concern is, would 
MMS IP prevent developers from creating programs such as 7-zip (GNU LGPL)?


Jose Ramirez

Most things come and go,
ideas ought not be one.

-Vorbis / Flac audio
-Theora / Dirac video
-jpeg / gif images
-SMILtext
-SMIL mutimedia container
-MMS ?

Received on Wednesday, 10 January 2007 18:02:17 UTC