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Graphics Software Programming IT Technology

RealNetworks Opens SMIL Implementation 106

Posted by Hemos from the releasing-the-code dept.
Rob Lanphier writes "RealNetworks just released the source code to their SMIL 2.0 implementation (along with JPEG, GIF, PNG, and WBMP implementations) as part of the Helix Community initiative, under the OSI-approved RPSL. Some neat tricks to do with the code: superimpose images on top of video, or transition effects between videos, using standard W3C-defined markup. More tech details in the Helix community datatype project page, or look at the SMIL production topics page. A precompiled release with this code will be coming out very soon."
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RealNetworks Opens SMIL Implementation More

RealNetworks Opens SMIL Implementation

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  • Helix Developers Can Now Easily Create Helix DNA Client Products Supporting Synchronized Multimedia

  • realone (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Pompatus ( 642396 ) on Monday July 07, 2003 @08:51AM (#6382249) Journal
    Does this mean I can play real audio/real video files without realone? I hate installing that thing on my computer. However, alot of stuff is only available in that format, such as live audio of nfl games and clips from my friends local hip hop group (www.psychoward.com, yes it uses flash too, I tried to tell him, but nobody listens)

    • Re:realone (Score:2, Insightful)

      by mark_lybarger ( 199098 )
      just curious, what's the beef with realone? if it works...

      that said, any player that supports SMIL will be able to utilized the technology.

      • Re:realone (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Pompatus ( 642396 )
        Personal preference I guess. And the fact they wanted some kind of survey filled out in order to download it.

        I'm currently using BSPlayer and love it. Now my beef with flash, on the other hand, could fill up your screen
        • Now my beef with flash, on the other hand, could fill up your screen

          Me too -- but at the same time I always liked the *potential* of Flash to produce nice interfaces (a pity it was an _unrealised_ potential, i.e. people used it to produce ads and nasty interfaces, but I digress).

          But then I found the Flash Click To Play extension for Moz Firebird, and now I'm happy with Flash again. I _never_ will have to see another flash ad (unless I want to), and I can watch flash movies whenever I want to. And someday

      • Re:realone (Score:3, Interesting)

        by jd142 ( 129673 )
        Realone is a lot better than the previous version of RealPlayer. RealPlayer made it incredibly difficult to stop it from loading on boot. When you went into preferences to turn it off, you got a message that sounded like turning off the startcenter would make your computer stop working correctly. The start center was also responsible for random crashes.

        We went through a period at work where the soultion to every crash was to remove the start center.

        But as I said, Real One is a lot better. Now the only
    • Don't criticise too harshly.
      You neglected to make www.psychoward.com [psychoward.com] a hyperlink.

    • Re:realone (Score:3, Informative)

      by JimDabell ( 42870 )

      No. SMIL is like an XML-based Flash, developed by the W3C.

      • Re:realone (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Wait, I thought SVG was an XML-based type of Flash? Now I'm confused.

        • Re:realone (Score:3, Insightful)

          by JimDabell ( 42870 )

          Well, no not really. SVG is an XML vector graphics format. You can embed vector graphics in Flash presentations, but there's a lot more to it than that.

    • Is it just me or does Real make it unreasonably difficult to download their player? It seems to me that if you want to encourage proliferation of your media format, you don't want to force users to go through a dozen or so clicks on your web site and then ask for a credit card number when issuing a trial! Since Real stopped offering a free player, I no longer bother with the format. Dealing with all the players in nonsense enough, I do not need the added hassle or even financial burden of paying for anot
      • Real still offers the free player. They just make it hard to find on the site, as they always have. Typically, 99% of the site is a bunch of big graphics and text advertising their free services, and some font size=1 text with a link to the "Basic Player". I can't even remember a time when the Basic player was easy to find on the website. Here are the links to download the free player:

        MacOS X [real.com]
        Windows [real.com]

        So yeah, it's there, you just have to look carefully. I'm not sure whether this is smart marketing or not, but they've always done it this way.
      • They DO offer a free player. Just look for the really small "download our free player" in some corner of the HUGE "download a trial version of the full player" -page.
      • This is totally fucked up. I've worked on a site for over five years that streams video using Real. The way they try to trick people into paying for a player is totally unethical. But check your facts. they do still offer a free player.

        Here's the thing: You don't have to give your credit card number. If you were asked for a credit card number, they tricked you. You were trying to download the trial version of the full RealOne player, not the free version.

        To download the free version, you need

      • Here's the URL to the free player:

        http://www.real.com/freeplayer/ [real.com]

        No, we don't require payment for the player.

        Rob

      • Adding to the list of ways to avoid the Real player, I use Winamp with the Tara audio/video plug-in which allows me to stream realaudio through Winamp. You still need some version of Real Audio installed though.

        Why not use the Real player? The old Real Audio tied the audio slider directly into the sound mixer in Windows (so if you turn down the player it turns down ALL wave audio on the PC). The new realOne seems to be nothing but annoying attempts to get me to buy it. I'll follow some of the above lin
        • At least they stopped that trick during registration where they subscribe you to mailings by putting the prechecked selections below the scroll window.

          That was the worst. My new annoyance with the RealOne player: It now takes a lot of effort to get rid of (can you even do it?) that horrible popup alerting you to new promotions or downloads available. I haven't looked into it much, but there is definitely no easy way to tell it to go away, and never come back.

    • You might want to try this. (Score:4, Informative)

      by MeanE ( 469971 ) on Monday July 07, 2003 @10:48AM (#6382825) Homepage
      The people of Kazaa Lite fame (if I am not mistaken) created this nice little package called Real Alternative [hccnet.nl] which is Media Player Classic [gabest.org] and the Real codecs package in one.

      Play those nice Real movies without the cruddy Real player!
    • MPlayer [mplayerhq.hu] does realvideo fine.
    • I use JetAudio to play Real audio / video files. It doesn't work as a plugin (I think) but I just save the files to my HD then play them back later. It's SO worth it not to have that ad-ware annoying piece of CRAP on my system. This program has no ads and lots of features I never use. It's not annoyned me or poped up anything after 5 months.

      FREE Real Audio/Video Player [jetaudio.com]

      It also plays other formats, but I usually use Winamp for everything else.

    • Re:realone (Score:3, Informative)

      by llin ( 54970 )

      Check out Helix's helix-client [helixcommunity.org] site. There've been some early developer release binaries available for quite some time.

      For real world use, you're probably better off using something like mplayer w/ the realplayer-codecs or if you're using Windows, something like JetAudio [jetaudio.com], or as others have mentioned, Media Player Classic + Real codecs

    • >>Does this mean I can play real audio/real
      >>video files without realone?

      No. SMIL is a language for describing how different media elements relate. It looks kind of like this:

      (CAVEAT: I haven't used SMIL since we played around with it doing webcasting in 1999; it may have changed since then)

      It defines spatial and temporal relations between multimedia elements. The media elements themselves, like the Real Audio file you mentioned, still need to have a player that can play them.

      • The tags appeared when I previewed... grrr...

        SMIL looks like this, I meant to say:

        <par>
        <img src="foo.gif">
        <seq>
        <video src="bar.ram">
        <img src="quux.png">
        </seq>
        </par>

        Only imagine lots more attributes specifying duration, position, z-index, alpha, etc...

  • SMIL? Don't talk to me about SMIL (Score:3, Informative)

    by Mr_Silver ( 213637 ) on Monday July 07, 2003 @08:57AM (#6382268)
    The problem with SMIL files is not the implementation of the filespec, but the way that phones deal with them.

    I work with SMIL files on a download platform and the biggest problem is the poor implementation by the manufacturers.

    So far, the only phones that use SMIL's correctly are the SonyEricsson T68i, T610, P800 and the SAGEM MY X-6. Other SMIL capable phones either:

    1. Pop up a message "unknown format"
    2. Show you only the first frame
    3. Force you to manually advance through each frame by pressing a button (all Nokia's do this)
    SMIL's will only get popular if the handset manufacturers can implement it correctly - and so far, they haven't.

    • SMIL's will only get popular if the handset manufacturers can implement it correctly - and so far, they haven't.

      This is a little bit like saying that HTML will only get popular if the handset manufacturers can implement it correctly. SMIL is not for phones. It can be used on phones, as can HTML or MP3 or JPEG, but it can also be used anywhere else. Consider the number of implementations [w3.org] out there. Only a small subset are for phones.

    • Re:SMIL? Don't talk to me about SMIL (Score:5, Informative)

      by tsvk ( 624784 ) on Monday July 07, 2003 @10:06AM (#6382561)

      You are confusing the SMIL used in mobile handset multimedia messages (MMS) and SMIL in general. SMIL wasn't created for MMS purposes, it's the other way around: MMS uses SMIL to define presentation.

      But MMS messages use a only a very limited subset of SMIL to define the MMS presentation. Currently an MMS is a SMIL slideshow where you link a picture, some text and a sound together for each slide (= par element), (example markup here [thewirelessfaq.com]). As you mentioned, all the Nokias ignore the timing information, etc. so the SMIL implementations by the handset makers are rather incomplete. But they very well may be so because to be MMS-conformant, they don't have to support all of SMIL [w3.org].

  • Platform4 player (Score:3, Informative)

    by Mr_Silver ( 213637 ) on Monday July 07, 2003 @09:03AM (#6382285)
    Although it doesn't support SMIL v2, Philips Platform4 player is a better player (IMO) to the Real one. It also copes with a number of other formats.

    http://www.mpeg-4.philips.com [philips.com].

    Windows and PPC only I'm afriad.

  • Some sample W3C-approved markup from an image:

    <image type="image/gif">
    <pixels>
    <pixel xcoord="0" ycoord="0">
    <phosphor color="red">15</phosphor>
    <phosphor color="green">60</phosphor>
    <phosphor color="blue">20</phosphor>
    </pixel>
    <pixel xcoord="1" ycoord="0">
    <phosphor color="red">14</phosphor>
    <phosphor color="green">60</phosphor>
    <phosphor color="blue">20</phosphor>
    </pixel>
    ...
    </pixels>
    • You could also do an image like this:

      <image type="image/gif">
      <pixels>
      <pixel xcoord="0" ycoord="0">
      <phosphor color="yellow">15</phosphor>
      <phosphor color="cyan">60</phosphor>
      <phosphor color="magenta">20</phosphor>
      </pixel>
      <pixel xcoord="1" ycoord="0" shape="round">
      <phosphor color="black">14</phosphor>
      <phosphor color="white">60</phosphor>
      </pixel>
      ...
      </pixels>
      </image>

      See? You can have per-
      • You forgot to include all the pretentious administrative crap like "This index is normative. This standard may be superseded by any number of future standards at an arbitrary point in time." Use lots of CSS to make every one of those boldfaced terms a different color.

        No, I'm not bitter about reading those awful standards documents...
    • And THAT is what capitalists call innovation. I mean, just look at it, images embedded directly into HTML. Doesn't Amazon already have a patent on this?

      Us geeks who have to write this stuff know it sucks ass. But can you imagine how many HTML web monkey can get their jobs back when they have to write out those images pixel by pixel. This could respark the dotcom boom.

  • RealNetwork source code? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Dark Lord Seth ( 584963 ) on Monday July 07, 2003 @09:05AM (#6382295) Journal
    1. Download source code.
    2. Skips advertisements.
    3. Start compiling.
    4. Enter email adress.
    5. Continue compiling.
    6. Ignore hordes of incoming spam.*
    7. Install software.
    8. Look at crappy videos from companies/people too stupid to use a decent codec.

    * = Only if user is retarded enough to enter a real email adress.

  • Flash Replacement? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by paugq ( 443696 )
    Can it be used as a Macromedia Flash replacement? :-?

    • Re:Flash Replacement? (Score:4, Informative)

      by rexguo ( 555504 ) on Monday July 07, 2003 @09:45AM (#6382451) Homepage
      To begin with, you will need to be able to read SWF files directly. After that, you need to implement a better renderer than Flash's vector engine. After which you need to mirror ActionScript's functionality in SMIL, probably as an extension. Finally, you need a content creation tool that's very much like Flash's IDE to have a smooth migration tool for Flash developers.

      • Re:Flash Replacement? (Score:4, Informative)

        by smallpaul ( 65919 ) <paul@@@prescod...net> on Monday July 07, 2003 @11:28AM (#6383098)

        To begin with, you will need to be able to read SWF files directly. After that, you need to implement a better renderer than Flash's vector engine. After which you need to mirror ActionScript's functionality in SMIL, probably as an extension. Finally, you need a content creation tool that's very much like Flash's IDE to have a smooth migration tool for Flash developers.

        First, SMIL is not intended to be a Flash replacement. The W3C set of standards are very modular so you would put several of them together to do the sort of things Flash does. SMIL alone is not even close. But then I doubt Flash is very close to SMIL. As far as ActionScript: SMIL is a Web technology. Of course you can use ECMAScript/Javascript with it.

    • Actually, the W3C spec that most closely matches the functionality of Flash is SVG [w3.org] (Scalable Vector Graphics). It includes high quality vector graphics and effects as well as animation and scripting.

      Note that this doesn't mean that it can play .SWF files, it merely provides more or less equivalent functionality.

      • Yes, spread the word. SVG is also a good nonproprietary replacement for PDF.
        • gah. PDF is an open standard with many free implementations. just because it originated in a company it does not mean it is not free. It is actually a very nice format.
        • I have to do a plug for a free service I've used Texterity [texterity.com]. I had a series of very complex PDF files that were saved from PageMaker to PC format PDFs under Macintosh. I was unable to open the file in Illistrator on the PC, and I needed to get the document in a form I could use from with XSL:FO so that I could make it part of a process that created a PDF from a predefine document that added some data and formatting. Using thier service, I was able to take the SVG they created from the PDF and included as

  • Presentation software (Score:3, Interesting)

    by smallpaul ( 65919 ) <paul@@@prescod...net> on Monday July 07, 2003 @09:49AM (#6382472)
    SMIL+SVG is the most logical output format and interchange format for Open source presentation programs. It would be terrific if they could get together to turn Mozilla into a standards-based multimedia presentation delivery platform.

  • SMIL is the first true multimedia XML sibling (Score:5, Informative)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Monday July 07, 2003 @09:49AM (#6382473)
    I worked with SMIL on some Multimedia and E-learning projects. And I must say: Allthough Realplayer looks like someone did doo-doo on your screen and their interpolation algorithms and scaling was really crappy back then (and Flash ruled everywhere) the actuall intention and scope of this language is somewhat sophisticated. It goes from simple Text and Hyperlinks all the way thourgh to serious layering and Video output.
    I'd actually trust SMIL to become the 'ogg' of multimedia data and Realplay with their opening Helix initiative seem determined to actually doing something usefull to the OSS community.
    Let's hope it turns out well.
  • While the OSI think the RPSL is Free, there's some disagreement on debian-legal. The primary issue is probably clause 2.1(d) which requires that changes be made publically available. Now, if you're a political dissident, you may want to modify existing code to some end not encouraged by your government. Under the GPL, you only need to provide your modifications to those that you trust - under the RPSL, you need to provide your modifications publically, which may be equivilent to a big sign saying "Please ar

  • Real (Score:3, Funny)

    by huntz0r ( 580511 ) on Monday July 07, 2003 @11:31AM (#6383127)
    <i>A precompiled release with this code will be coming out very soon."</i>

    As soon as it finishes buffering.
  • I really wonder the first moron to claim RealOne player is spyware, on this topic.

    Also pointing me down is kinda same thing. Thats why I don't use "no karma bonus" button unchecked first time.
  • Folks seem to have a lot of bitterness towards RealNetworks. I certainly agree the download process is self-defeatingly difficult. But of the Big Three propritary formats, RealNetworks is the only one shipping a *NIX player. It's community supported only, but is really pretty good, and they provide downloadable updates to the latest.

    Real also provides authoring tools for Linux, albeit command-line only.

    Also, the Real codecs are really quite nice. RealVideo 9 is second only to Windows Media Video 9 in terms of compression efficiency, and performs better on lower end machines. The audio codecs are getting a little long in the tooth, but are still more than adequate for real-time streaming applications.

    • Also, the Real codecs are really quite nice. RealVideo 9 is second only to Windows Media Video 9 in terms of compression efficiency, and performs better on lower end machines. The audio codecs are getting a little long in the tooth, but are still more than adequate for real-time streaming applications.

      Check out doom9.org forums, specifically, the "new A/V format [doom9.org]" forum. THE Senior Codec Engineer of RealNetworks posts daily there. He does it on his own free time and even lets the forum readers in on pre

  • I won't touch anything from Real with a 10 foot pole.

    Is anyone else taking this stand against the most annoying company on the internet? (IMO)

  • SMILGen (Score:2, Informative)

    by belial ( 674 )
    Just to add a note, if you're interested in authoring SMIL, but fear hand-editing,

    http://www.smilgen.org/ [smilgen.org]

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/smilgen [sourceforge.net]
  • The problem with Real networks is that the player sucks....

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