Not every site owner or Web developer can afford Flash, Director or video editing or creation tools to integrate pictures, sound and video into their sites. Even PowerPoint might be out of your grasp. And, let's face it -- they're not the easiest tools to master, either. But what if you do have Notepad, and a range of sound, video or image files? What’s the answer? SMILE! Or: SMIL, to be precise.

We've discussed the background of SMIL now let's look at the how to produce a simple presentation. We're going to create a presentation in which video is in the upper left corner, a slide show of three graphics plays in the right corner and under both of these is a text file that describes what is going on in the pictures and video. Here is how the presentation will be laid out and look in the Real Player.

A standards body released a second draft version of a key Web multimedia standard yesterday, and the revision has Microsoft's fingerprints all over it.

SMIL 2.0, the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, has begun to establish itself as an important new approach for integrating multimedia into Web content. SMIL, which offers XML-based approaches for controlling the timing and presentation of multimedia elements, has begun to attract the support of many large software vendors and toolmakers, making it increasingly accessible for developers. In this article, Anne Zieger provides an overview of SMIL and describes several tools available to make SMIL coding simpler.

Devshed has an article on SMIL. Good technology, needs broader coporate support.

Video-based techniques have become central to many areas of social science research, although their use has been limited by the expense and complexity of tools for working with video information. New standards for the representation of digital video make the manipulation of video for observational research a far less time-consuming and expensive process. We provide an overview of SMIL, a cross-platform markup standard, and how it can be used to edit, synchronize, caption and present video clips without modifying the original digital video files. We also present TransTool – a free Windows program which can generate SMIL files for playing video clips of interest along with captions and codes. TransTool can also be used as a transcribing and coding tool that synchronizes video and text such as transcripts. These tools greatly facilitate tasks such as creating video events with multi-language transcripts, showing synchronized views of the same event, and the incorporation of video clips into presentations and web pages.

In an earlier article, Streaming Media World featured an article about Confluent Technologies, a Canadian company that offers a SMIL authoring tool known as Fluition. This article features some explanations of how the Fluition software functions, including screenshots. There is also a Tips and Tricks section on SMIL authoring, provided by the team at Confluent Technologies.

The Web and its related technologies are maturing, starting to take shape and become that which we've been yearning for all this time. The caveman days of the Web are over! After all, even our great-grandfathers knew how to make simple flipbook animations, and the majority of animation on the Web has been simple multiple-frame GIFs--today's version of those ancient flipbooks. And the video up until now has been stuff that no undergraduate would even consider presenting to his professor. So why all the hubbub about the Web?

Learn basic layout structures and how to use HTML with SMIL to control the layout of complex integrated designs that include HTML and elements of dynamic content.

A new markup language that promises to allow for easily crafted, bandwidth-friendly multimedia on the Web has been baptized as an official Internet standard. Today, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) declared Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) a Recommendation: the W3C's seal of approval that the specification is final and ready for prime time.

When Microsoft rejects a proposed technology standard, it's usually a death knell. But with a recently adopted W3C standard for streaming audio and video files online, Microsoft is snubbing a standard that a majority of multimedia Web developers plan to adopt.

Like most people developing Web content today, I found my way here from another discipline. I spent my first two post-college years working in the video industry. In fact, the only reason I'm not still grinding my teeth away to nubbins in an editing suite somewhere is because I had the unlikely good fortune of losing the master copy of my demo reel in the mail while between jobs, forcing a career move into the burgeoning world of the Internet.

If you've been following our series of articles on SMIL/G2, you've already seen an overview of G2/SMIL technology, URLs for all the tools you'll need, and a detailed G2/SMIL Tutorial. The first tutorial covered RealPix and the SMIL language, and if you were able to follow through, enabled you to get started creating your own SMIL presentations. In this tutorial, we'll cover RealText, and show you how to use it along with RealPix in your SMIL presentations.

If adopted as a standard, a new World Wide Web Consortium public draft promises to deliver that elusive "television-style content" over the Web, without arcane scripting or strangled bandwidth.

Right now, when it comes to creating animation for the Web, Flash is king — people sic it on everything from rollover buttons to entire site interfaces. But will it reign supreme forever? Web developers are a fickle bunch, and Flash could always be dethroned by another multimedia technology as long as it was easy to use, could be viewed all users, and employed by a familiar programming language (thus ensuring speedy development and a friendly learning curve).

With the introduction of Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL, pronounced smile) earlier this year, Web multimedia creators have a new tool set for building time-based, streaming multimedia presentations that combine audio, video, images, and text. The proposed SMIL standard defines an XML-based language that allows control over the what, where, and when of media elements in a multimedia presentation with a simple, clear markup language similar to HTML.

In the absence of finalized rich media standards for the web, plug-ins were developed that enabled websites to offer streaming video, animated vector graphics, annoying music tracks, and the like. Over the past couple of years, W3C recommendations have emerged to suggest standardized ways of doing what proprietary plug-ins already do so well.

The SMIL family of XML applications enables synchronized display of multimedia elements on the Web. Didier Martin explores SMIL, and the new synchronization features in Microsoft's IE5.5."