RealNetworks Opens SMIL Implementation 106
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."
Biotech is really going Hollywood (Score:2, Funny)
realone (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:realone (Score:2, Insightful)
that said, any player that supports SMIL will be able to utilized the technology.
Re:realone (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm currently using BSPlayer and love it. Now my beef with flash, on the other hand, could fill up your screen
Re:realone (Score:2)
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)
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
Re:realone (Score:1)
Re:realone (Score:1)
You neglected to make www.psychoward.com [psychoward.com] a hyperlink.
Re:realone (Score:3, Informative)
No. SMIL is like an XML-based Flash, developed by the W3C.
Re:realone (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:realone (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
On a side note... (a little OT) (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:On a side note... (a little OT) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:On a side note... (a little OT) (Score:1)
when the first internet radios started popping up.
Re:On a side note... (a little OT) (Score:2)
Bitch about Real Networks on Slashdot, it will give you karma... Heh
Re:On a side note... (a little OT) (Score:2)
(I hope no session keys are embedded in that URL...)
Re:On a side note... (a little OT) (Score:1)
is still floating around on Unix centric servers (google for a personal
site, on an Australian university, I used that version for close to
two years.)
This latest official release forced me to reboot my machine, after being up for 70 something days, and I removed it altogether.
Re:On a side note... (a little OT) (Score:2)
Re:On a side note... (a little OT) (Score:3, Informative)
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
Easy way to find free player (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.real.com/freeplayer/ [real.com]
No, we don't require payment for the player.
Rob
Re:Easy way to find free player (mod parent up) (Score:1)
Re:Easy way to find free player (mod parent up) (Score:3, Informative)
I will forward your comments on, though. One thing that would be very helpful is posting your comments on our official comment form [real.com].
Rob
Re:Easy way to find free player (mod parent up) (Score:1)
Re:On a side note... (a little OT) (Score:1)
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
Re:On a side note... (a little OT) (Score:1)
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)
Play those nice Real movies without the cruddy Real player!
Re:realone (Score:2)
Get JetAudio (Score:2)
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)
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
Re:realone (Score:2)
>>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.
Oh bother... (Score:2)
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)
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:
Re:SMIL? Don't talk to me about SMIL (Score:2, Funny)
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)
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)
http://www.mpeg-4.philips.com [philips.com].
Windows and PPC only I'm afriad.
Re:Platform4 player (Score:1)
Worst markup ever (Score:2, Funny)
<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>
Re:MOD PARENT FLAMEBAIT (Score:2, Funny)
The fact that such an obvious fake was marked "informative" doesn't shock or surprise me.
But think of the flexibility!! (Score:2)
<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-
Re:But think of the flexibility!! (Score:1)
No, I'm not bitter about reading those awful standards documents...
Re:Worst markup ever (Score:2)
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)
* = Only if user is retarded enough to enter a real email adress.
Flash Replacement? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Flash Replacement? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Flash Replacement? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
SVG is the "Flash replacement" (Score:2, Informative)
Note that this doesn't mean that it can play .SWF files, it merely provides more or less equivalent functionality.
Re:SVG is the "Flash replacement" (Score:2)
Re:SVG is the "Flash replacement" (Score:1)
Re:SVG is the "Flash replacement" (Score:3, Interesting)
Presentation software (Score:3, Interesting)
SMIL is the first true multimedia XML sibling (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Digital Genlock! (Score:1)
Some neat tricks to do with the code: superimpose images on top of video, or transition effects between videos,
A genlock superimposes text on top of video. There is a program for Win16 and Win32 [demon.co.uk] already which can make the subtitles, and I was just commenting that I would have liked to see a way to do it using tools like this.
Pardon the slashbot-ism, but I have to say that IMHO, TMAOC again.
-uso.
Not clearly free (Score:2)
Real (Score:3, Funny)
As soon as it finishes buffering.
I wonder (Score:2)
Also pointing me down is kinda same thing. Thats why I don't use "no karma bonus" button unchecked first time.
Rember RealNetworks has only official *NIX player (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Rember RealNetworks has only official *NIX play (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Just like the Grinch (Score:1)
Is anyone else taking this stand against the most annoying company on the internet? (IMO)
SMILGen (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.smilgen.org/ [smilgen.org]
http://sourceforge.net/projects/smilgen [sourceforge.net]
The problem with Real is the player sucks.... (Score:1)