Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

oni · Oct 25, 2005, 03:12 AM

Hi all,

Has anyone here used SMIL? I am making a presentation in SMIL and it just wont play on the mac. Ive got it mostly working on the PC it just doesnt have the right codecs to play the MOV files my digital camera produces.

Yet any attempt to run it on the mac results in failure. I have tried quicktime player, real player and ambulant player.

Any SMIL experts here want to help me out?

I will post code if anyone knows what i am talking about eg SMIL

Cheers

Diggory Laycock · Oct 25, 2005, 04:35 AM

Any error messages?

Is it valid SMIL?

http://www.google.com/search?client=...8&oe=UTF-8

oni · Oct 25, 2005, 06:15 AM

it validates fine, and works on real player on Windows (apart from the videos, but thats just a matter of getting a format that real player can play)

Its just that on the mac it complains of not finding files, unexplained errors etc.

This is the code from my main smil file:

When running this on real player on the mac i get "a general error has occured looking for the file (file path)/tile.jpg"

On ambulant player it just exits straight away with no error, even with debug output on

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE smil PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SMIL 2.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/2001/SMIL20/SMIL20.dtd">
<smil xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/SMIL20/Language" xml:lang="en" title="IIST SMIL Presentation">
<head>
<layout>
<root-layout width="597px" height="600px"/>
<region id="logo" height="44px" width="277px" fit="fill"/>
<region id="welcometext" width="277px" top="44px"/>
<region id="welcomesidebar" width="323px" left="277px" fit="fill"/>
<region id="abouttext" width="277px" top="44px"/>
<region id="secondarylogo" height="44px" width="277px" fit="fill"/>
<region id="mainsiderbarone" height="200px" width="320px" left="277px" fit="fill"/>
<region id="mainsiderbartwo" height="200px" width="320px" left="277px" top="200px" fit="fill"/>
<region id="mainsiderbarthree" height="200px" width="320px" left="277px" top="400px" fit="fill"/>
<region id="creditsbutton" height="30px" width="277px" top="567px"/>
</layout>
<transition id="wipe1" type="barWipe" subtype="leftToRight" dur="3s"/>
</head>
<body>
<seq>
<par dur="8s">
<img src="Media Objects/tile.jpg" alt="iist logo" region="logo"/>
<img src="Media Objects/undergradlab.jpg" alt="side bar" region="welcomesidebar"/>
<animateMotion values="277,0; 135,0; 70,0; 0,0" calcMode="linear" dur="4s" targetElement="logo"/>
<animateMotion values="277,600; 277,450; 277,300; 277,0" calcMode="linear" dur="5s" targetElement="welcomesidebar"/>
<text region="welcometext" src="Media Objects/maintitle.txt"/>
</par>
<par id="mainpart">
<img src="Media Objects/tile.jpg" alt="iist logo" region="secondarylogo"/>
<img src="Media Objects/undergradlab.jpg" region="mainsidebarone" left="277px">
<area href="undergradlab.smil" coords="0%, 0%, 100%, 100%" show="replace"/>
</img>
<img src="Media Objects/postgradlab.jpg" region="mainsidebartwo" left="277px" top="200px">
<area href="postgradlab.smil" coords="0%, 0%, 100%, 100%" show="replace"/>
</img>
<img src="Media Objects/projectroom.jpg" region="mainsidebarthree" left="277px" top="400px">
<area href="projectroom.smil" coords="0%, 0%, 100%, 100%" show="replace"/>
</img>
<animateMotion values="0,44; 0,33; 0,22; 0,0" calcMode="linear" dur="4s" targetElement="secondarylogo"/>
<text region="abouttext" src="Media Objects/aboutiist.txt"/>
<text region="creditsbutton" src="Media Objects/creditsbutton.txt">
<area href="credits.smil" coords="0%, 0%, 100%, 100%" show="replace"/>
</text>
</par>
</seq>
</body>
</smil>

Diggory Laycock · Oct 25, 2005, 06:41 AM

Hmm - fiddled about, here's my findings:

<text region="abouttext" src="Media Objects/aboutiist.txt"/>

should be:

<text region="abouttext" src="Media Objects/aboutList.txt"/>

and also - (probably due to bad coding on Real's part) - it doesn't seem to like spaces in the paths.

If you search and replace "Media Objects" with "MediaObjects" (and remove the space from the name of the actual folder) - it appears to work in Real Player.

oni · Oct 25, 2005, 04:07 PM

Cheers for the spaces idea that seemed to work. Seems like pretty crap on real players part.

Side note they still do not play in ambulant player, just does the same thing

Not too sure about this comment as I dont have a "aboutList.txt" file!

Now I have encountered another problem. That is what video formats are capable of being put in a SMIL presentation?

I have tried encoding my video files in the default off my camera MOV, H.264, MPEG4-improved, and an AVI (with cinepak codec i think) none of these files seem to play properly.

larkost · Oct 26, 2005, 03:11 PM

SMIL does not define what video formats are allowed, that is up to the media player to support. QuickTime naturally supports all of the QuickTime formats when it plays SMIL, but it is not the most feature-complete SMIL player out there.

oni · Oct 26, 2005, 04:01 PM

Thats what i thought but there are some media files that are able to be played by themeselves yet are unable to be played when put in a SMIL presentation.