Designing Web Audio & CD-ROM

Chapter 7. Designing Multimedia Presentations with SMIL and RealSystem G2

The RealSystem G2 is a completely re-engineered architecture of the RealMedia system and was built from the ground up to replace the entire line of RealAudio 5.0 encoding and streaming tools. RealNetwork’s second-generation platform introduces enhanced streaming features and powerful new media capabilities that allow you to stream multiple media and datatypes, including separate audio, video, image, and text files, in a synchronized presentation. In addition, G2 offers many improvements in the efficiency and functionality of encoding and streaming media files.

RealSystem G2’s SMIL-based multimedia may not have the interactive power and graphics sophistication of Flash or Shockwave presentations, but it has the advantage of a huge user base and the ease of creating multimedia with a simple markup language. By copying the SMIL tags in this chapter, you can get up and running with a fairly rich, albeit simple, multimedia presentation. In contrast, Flash packs more power and automatically takes care of complex timeline issues, but it requires learning a whole new proprietary authoring environment. Expect to see Flash used more widely for more complex high-impact presentations, such as movie and game trailers or product demos, and SMIL for more common everyday uses, such as audio slide shows, sound with scrolling text captions, and video news feeds.

The creation of streaming multimedia presentations is accomplished ...