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.

SMIL-Generator for Powerpoint presentations is a recording application which not only logs slide changes during presentation but also can encode audio/video signals via RealSystem Producer and synchronize encoded audio/video with presented slides. The application generates a set of HTML/SMIL documents which can easily be presented on the web. If you have an EVI-D31 camera attached somewhere in the network and you control camera operations during your presentation, the application also logs those camera movements and synchronizes them with your presentation.

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.

The indexes were extracted from the SMIL 2.0 Recommendation.

The Web Accessibility Initiative ([WAI]) worked together with the W3C SYMM Working Group to pursue and promote accessibility in the design of [SMIL 1.0] before it became a W3C Recommendation in June 15th, 1998. The SMIL standard presented the WAI group some new challenges as it is the first W3C standard focused in creating TV like presentations by synchronizing media objects. A SMIL presentation may have a lot of temporal material, some of it is in video or audio form and some just comes from the synchronization abilities.

GoSMIL is a site, supported by PlayStream, designed to assist you with learning SMIL, by providing you with presentation examples, that demonstrate the following:

The W3C’s SMIL format for encoding multimedia presentations for delivery over the Web is a little-known, but widely used standard. First released in mid-1998, SMIL has been installed on approximately 200,000,000 desktops world-wide, primarily because of its adoption in RealPlayer G2/7/8, Quicktime 4.1, and Internet Explorer 6. In August, 2001, the W3C released a significant update to SMIL: version 2.0.

SMIL Parser and Composer - C++ API Reference

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.

Putting together SMIL files for shared playlists is a pain by hand, so I've adapted Erik Benson's Morale-o-Meter code to produce the appropriate output.

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

The graphics, media clips, images, sounds and text found on our website, unless stated otherwise, are within the Public Domain. You may download and use them. Credit back to the Cognitive Development Laboratory is appreciated.

SMIL adds timing and media synchronization support to the web.

The SMIL Tutorial - Index

In addition to including URLs to clips, a SMIL file can use other Ram and SMIL files as sources. This lets you update a sequence of clips frequently by changing a simple RAM file, rather than your main SMIL file, for example.

This document collection is a browsable HTML version of the SMIL DTD. You can access it by clicking here.

Before you write your own SMIL files, be sure that you understand the SMIL components and syntax rules as described in SMIL Basics.

Next generation browsers will treat audio and video as easy as old browsers treated text and images.

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.