[Fsfe-uk] Flash and SMIL players, was: BBC digital curriculum service in England

[MJ Ray]

On 2004-10-14 10:10:51 +0100 Alex Hudson <address@hidden> wrote:

> [...] if the browser cannot do it natively, that means some kind
> of plugin but you then again have a synchronisation problem.

This sounds like an implementation problem. The SMIL Timing and 
Synchronisation module looks to have this covered: 
http://www.w3.org/TR/smil20/smil-timing.html - or are there defects I 
don't see, being inexperienced with this?

> [...]
> *except* that SMIL is linear (Flash isn't, it's non-linear so you can
> make it interactive). Flash supports SMIL too, btw.

What do you mean by non-linear? The example use of the excl element 
looks non-linear to me, so maybe I'm not understanding it.

> I think Helix is probably the only real player that could provide a 
> SMIL
> solution, and that does have audio/video, but I'm not sure about it's
> abilities wrt. SVG or scripting :/

Me neither. Something to test RSN, I guess, unless some kind soul 
posts a review of these aspects. (Anyone want to boost their karma?)

> The Moz SVG project is here: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/

I've added a link to this. libart doesn't seem such a nasty dependency 
to me...

> * support for Flash video and audio (not sure how advanced this is)

I added a link to http://ffmpeg.sf.net/ which looks like it can do 
that.

> * support for ActionScript (ditto)

Is this "based on" JavaScript?

--
MJR/slef    My Opinion Only and not of any group I know
 Creative copyleft computing - http://www.ttllp.co.uk/
Speaking at ESF on Sat 16 Oct - http://www.affs.org.uk/