Re: Question regarding timeline concepts in SMIL

Hi !

As far as I know, the presentation semantics and control behavior of  
the "seek bar" which is exposed in SMIL players vary from one  
implementation to another. For example, take two major SMIL 2.0  
desktop players - RealOne and Ambulant - and you'll notice some  
strong differences in that respect.

Arguably, a SMIL presentation is unlikely to be linear and  
deterministic, given the levels of interaction and conditional  
execution that can be achieved. Therefore the "raison-d'etre" of a  
linear progress indicator and/or seek control is somewhat futile for  
interactive multimedia (see how Flash players work).

I would recommend not relying on a player-dependent feature like the  
GUI's "seek bar", and instead search for a more universal solution  
based on pure-SMIL authored content.

Is your design requirement to let the viewer seek through the content  
at any time, or to simply display a non-interactive progress bar ?

Hope that helps, Dan/

On 30 Sep 2007, at 14:50, Spiral Universe wrote:
> Thanks Daniel but I was thinking of something totally different.  
> Let's say I have 2 movies, one for the content and one is the  
> advertisement. Somewhere in the middle of content movie I "insert"  
> the advertisement movie (most probably using an excl node) and  
> while this ad is playing I want that the player to display the  
> position of the content movie in it's seekbar (just ignoring that  
> there is another video playing). I just don't understand how this  
> seekbar could be synchronized with videos.

Received on Sunday, 30 September 2007 15:13:39 UTC