QuickTime and SMIL

This chapter introduces you to SMIL (pronounced “smile”), which stands for Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language. SMIL is a Web Consortium standard for describing multimedia presentations. QuickTime 4.1 and later can play SMIL presentations as if they were QuickTime movies.

The complete SMIL specification is available at

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-smil/

If you are a content author, Webmaster or QuickTime developer, you can use SMIL to create multimedia presentations that play from the desktop or over the Web using the QuickTime plug-in or the QuickTime Player application. This document provides you with a general introduction to SMIL and its usage in QuickTime.

Specifically, QuickTime provides SMIL support for stored streams, such as Video On Demand (VOD). This enables content providers to insert an ad before, during or after a stream. QuickTime also provides SMIL support for live streams, with the ability to insert an ad at the beginning of the stream, as well as parallel streams, which are useful for banner ads in a Web page.

The document is divided into the following major sections:

“Introduction to SMIL” provides a brief overview of SMIL and its key features.
“Getting Started With SMIL” shows how to create a basic layout, define display regions, create a timeline with sequential and parallel media elements, specify media elements and set their durations, and make an element into a clickable link.
“Using SMIL in QuickTime” discusses how SMIL presentations may be used to enhance QuickTime playback.
“Embedding SMIL Documents in a Web Page” discusses the ways you can embed a SMIL document in a Web page so that it plays in QuickTime Player or the QuickTime plug-in.
“SMIL Support in QuickTime” describes the SMIL capabilities, supported in QuickTime, that enable content authors and developers to incorporate advertising clips into stored and live streams of QuickTime movies.
“QuickTime SMIL Extensions in Detail” discusses in detail the extensions to SMIL that allow an author to optionally specify richer behaviors which are supported by QuickTime but do not have a SMIL equivalent.
“Movie Media Handler” describes the features of the Movie Media handler available in QuickTime.
“References” lists some of the documents that are useful sources of additional information.

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Last updated: 2002-10-01

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