SMIL 3.0 Support in Ambulant

This page provides basic background information on the new SMIL 3.0 features that have been integrated into the current release of the AMBULANT player. For the SMIL 3.0 specification itself, please go to the W3C SMIL 3.0 pages.

The goal of the SMIL 3.0 effort has been to define a number of extensions that implement user-requested functionality. The principal extensions are:

Integrated Timed Text: the smilText extensions provide a comprehensive set of text definition, styling, timing and motion attributes to allow full-functional timed text to be defined within a SMIL document. The smilText Profile also provide a mechanism for defining an external streaming text container, for use with SMIL or with other embedded smilText engines.
Extended Support for Timed Metadata: SMIL 3.0 now allows metadata to be attached to any element within the body of a SMIL presentation. This allows SMIL to be used as a container for temporal metadata (in RDF or any other format), whether or not the file contains media content pointers.
Data-Model Based Shared State: the temporal nature of the SMIL document tree makes conventional access to active presentations via a DOM mechanism dangerous, since temporal consistency can't be assured. In order to support sharing of document-level state with other XML applications, SMIL 3.0 has introduced a mechansim called SMIL State. SMIL State allows a shared data model to be defined and/or referenced, allowing variables to be defined, manipulated and shared with other applications.
Pan/Zoom Image Animation: SMIL 3.0 now contains explicit support for Ken Burns-style pan and zoom animations.
Improved Opacity Control: SMIL 3.0 integrates and unifies a set of opacity control extensions first introduced into the RealPlayer.

In addition, SMIL 3.0 restructures the use of XML namespaces to allow more efficient implementations, adopting the version and baseProfiles to identify particular SMIL dialects. It also introduces the SMIL Tiny and SMIL Daisy profiles, which provide the introduction of focused versions of SMIL for particular target platforms. Finally, support for mobile versions of SMIL has been restructured into the SMIL UnifiedMobile profile.

An overview of SMIL's profile architecture and the modules supported by each profile is given in the SMIL Profile Table, which is taken from the book SMIL 3.0: Interactive Multimedia for the Web, Mobile Devices and Daisy Talking Books. The table is used by permission of the publisher, Springer.

AMBULANT's support for SMIL 3.0 is summarized in the document SMIL Support Table for Ambulant, which is taken from the book SMIL 3.0: Interactive Multimedia for the Web, Mobile Devices and Daisy Talking Books. The table is used by permission of the publisher, Springer.