Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language

The W3C working group on synchronized multimedia has developed a language for Web-based Multimedia presentations called SMIL: the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language. This paper presents GRiNS, an authoring and presentation environment that can be used to create SMIL-compliant documents and to play SMIL documents created with GRiNS or by hand.

In this paper, we present the design and development of a real-time interactive virtual classroom multimedia distance learning system at the University of Washington. There has been rapid progress in digital media compression research, and the delivery of media data on the public Internet is becoming widespread. A real-time interactive virtual classroom allows a remote participant to not only receive a live class feed, but also to interact in a live class by asking questions with audio, video in real-time using an Internet connection. Many instructors use electronically prepared slides during their class. The traditional video coding algorithms are not able to compress this slide data very well at low bit-rate. We propose a web-based real-time presentation system for the electronic slides. Instructors also write text on a white board or a piece of paper during the class. At low bit-rate, the conventional video encoding algorithms cannot encode this handwritten text video with enough fidelity, resulting in an illegible decoded video. We propose an extension of the well known bilevel image encoding algorithms to handle the handwritten text video. Our method results in decoded video frames which can be read very clearly when encoded at low bit-rate. We have developed a set of tools which allows recording the live classroom session and automatic creation of a synchronized multimedia integration language (SMIL) presentation, which can be used for a later viewing.

The demand for and expectation of ubiquitous access to multimedia online learning resources are much higher amongst computer science students than other fields of study. Previous systems providing internet access to digital video or audio recordings of lectures have been disappointing or ineffective as a learning experience or excessively complex and time-consuming from the educator's point of view. This paper describes a new approach to building an online presentation archive of lectures, based on a relatively new Recommendation from W3C called SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) . It describes a highly efficient and integrated system for capturing, indexing, searching and delivering online presentations without relying upon proprietary technology.

The Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) [Aya01] is an W3C [W3C03] specification for authoring multimedia documents. Although SMIL has XML like syntactic constructs, unlike XML, SMIL compositions have an intended semantics stemming from intuitive notions of playing out many media streams relative to each other. Although there are many excellent models for XML access control [DdVPS00, DdVPS02, BCF01, BCFM00, SF02, KH00, GB02, KW02, GF03], they do not respect the intended meaning of multimedia constructs. To remedy this, we propose a model for controlling accesses to SMIL documents by decorating them with appropriate RDF statements that respect these semantics. Using this model, we show how such documents can be fetched by secure runtimes from secure multimedia servers.

This paper describes the process and particular support tools for authoring reusable web-based multimedia presentations. These tools enable authors to record and encode streams of audio and video, and to integrate into them additional multimedia material, such as PowerPoint slides. The paper also describes the W3C synchronized multimedia integration language (SMIL) standard that enables the interlinking of audio/video with additional material. Finally, the paper introduces an easy-to-use authoring tool, developed and used by the author's faculty to produce multimedia information packages, and their corresponding user interface.

The advances in computer and graphic technologies have led to the popular use of multimedia for information exchange. However, multimedia systems are difficult to test. A major reason is that these systems generally exhibit fuzziness in their temporal behaviors. The fuzziness is caused by the existence of non-deterministic factors in their runtime environments, such as system load and network traffic. It complicates the analysis of test results. The problem is aggravated when a test involves the synchronization of different multimedia streams as well as variations in system loading. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on the testing and fault-identification of multimedia systems by treating the issue as a classification problem. Typical classification techniques, including Bayesian networks, knearest neighbor, and neural networks, are experimented with the use of X-Smiles, an open source multimedia authoring tool supporting the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL). The encouraging result of our study, which is based only on five attributes, shows that our proposal can achieve an accuracy of 57.6 to 79.2% in identifying the types of fault in environments where common cause variations are present. A further improvement of *

This paper presents a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) prototype tool called ACTS (Annotation Collaboration Tool via SMIL -Synchronized Multimedia Integrated Language), which was designed to meet the user requirements of a distributed, collaborative team performing remote analysis of robotic welds. Based on open standards such as W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) SMIL, ACTS provides a framework of temporal and spatial synchronization for multimedia data streams. An annotation facility provides for asynchronous collaboration among colleagues. ACTS uses the NISTdeveloped S2M2 [2] Java applet-based SMIL player that implements and extends the SMIL 1.0 specification. Future work is also discussed.