SMIL Scripting Guide for QuickTime: SMIL Support in QuickTime

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SMIL Support in QuickTime

For QuickTime to play a SMIL presentation, the presentation must use media elements that QuickTime can play, such as QuickTime movies, real-time streams in QuickTime format, AIFF and MP3 sound files, JPEG and GIF images, FLIC animations, text files, MIDI files, and so on.

As a simple test, if you can successfully open a URL in QuickTime Player (using Open URL in the File menu), you can use that URL as the src attribute of a media element in a SMIL presentation for QuickTime.

QuickTime does not currently support the complete SMIL specification. You can use all the SMIL tags and parameters described in “Creating SMIL Scripts,” but you should note the following exceptions from the W3C specification for SMIL 1.0:

Regions can’t have scroll bars (don’t use fit="scroll" in the <region> tag).
Only the basic layout is supported (no CSS-based layout).
The <switch> tag can’t be used to specify a root layout from a list.
Hyperlinks can’t be used to pause the current SMIL presentation, load another one, then resume the current presentation (don’t use show="pause" in the <a> tag).
You can’t jump to a named point in another SMIL presentation—don’t use links of the form <ahref="fname.smi#anchor">.

Following is a summary of SMIL elements and attributes currently supported in QuickTime. Additional QuickTime-specific attributes are supported for some elements, as described in the section “QuickTime SMIL Extensions.”

In this section:

Structural Elements Supported in QuickTime
Media Elements Supported in QuickTime
Dynamic Elements supported in QuickTime

Structural Elements Supported in QuickTime

<smil></smil>
<head></head>
<layout></layout>
<root-layout></root-layout>
- height
- width
- id
- background-color

Note: Only basic layout is supported, not CSS layout. The root layout cannot be specified inside a <switch> element.

<region/>
- height
- width
- top
- left
- z-index
- fit (hidden,fill,meet,slice)
<body></body>
<seq></seq>
<par></par>

Media Elements Supported in QuickTime

QuickTime supports the following media elements. Media typing in SMIL is not strict, so media types that do not have an exact match in SMIL, such as Flash and VR, can be labeled as animation or video in a SMIL file.

<audio/>
<video/>
<img/>
<text/>
<textstream/>
<animation/>

Media elements can contain the following attributes:

src
id
region
dur
begin
end
clip-begin
clip-end

If used inside a <switch> element, media elements can contain the following attributes as system requirements:

system-language
system-bitrate
system-screen-size
system-screen-depth

Dynamic Elements supported in QuickTime

QuickTime supports the following dynamic SMIL elements.

<a></a>
- href
- show (new,replace)
- target

Note: In addition to the standard targets, such as the default browser window or a named frame, QuickTime supports the target value quicktimeplayer. QuickTime does not support the use of named anchors within the href parameter (for example, href="URL#name" is treated as href="URL").

<switch></switch>
- system-language
- system-bitrate
- system-screen-size
- system-screen-depth

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Last updated: 2005-06-04

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