On 1 December 2008 the multimedia language SMIL3.0 was announced as W3C Recommendation by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Researcher Dick Bulterman (CWI) is head of the group that developed this language. The latest version of SMIL makes integration of multimedia easier and more efficient. Digital books for the blind, play lists for media players and MMS messages are all based on this language.

SMIL combines multimedia

The Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL, pronounce "smile") was developed 10 years ago to control the rising multimedia on the internet. It is a descriptive language enabling end-users to enhance their presentation with speech, pictures, video and other media. SMIL-codes written in the latest version are less complex and thus simpler for developers. Other new features are communication with other applications and more interaction with the end-user.

SMIL is hidden behind frequently used applications like MMS messages with video, text, and sound that everybody exchanges on their mobile phones. The language is also very useful in DAISY Talking Books, books for people having problems with written media. SMIL improves the navigation in these books, thus making it easier to search the encyclopaedia for the blind. Play lists people make for their music or film collections in a media player are also often based on SMIL.

Valuable contribution of CWI researchers

The contribution of CWI to the latest version of SMIL is considerable. CWI researcher Dick Bulterman collaborated with Jack Jansen in ‘SMIL State', a new descriptive language to exchange data between XML applications. With Pablo César, Bulterman worked on a version of SMIL for interactive television and with Sjoerd Mullender he developed a new language for subtitling things like webvideos on YouTube. Since 1997 CWI is active in the W3C Working Group. The W3C Recommendation means that SMIL3.0 is considered stable and that the members of the consortium recommend it to industry.

Book

Last month a book was published about the latest version of SMIL: SMIL3.0: Interactive Multimedia for Web, Mobile and DAISY Talking Books (Springer-Verlag), written by CWI researcher Dick Bulterman: Bulterman, D.C.A., Rutledge, L.W.: SMIL 3.0 - Flexible Multimedia for Web, Mobile Devices and Daisy Talking Books. Springer-Verlag, 2009 (ISBN: 978-3-540-78546-0).

Demo

To play a SMIL3.0 presentation, the open source Ambulant Player of CWI can be used. This program and some demos of SMIL applications are availbe on:

www.ambulantplayer.org

 

In the illustration: left the new SMIL3.0 book and right the logo of Ambulant Player.