QT + SMIL = BAD COMBO

[Chipp Walters]

Hey folks,

Just thought I'd mention this so it's in the archives.
Been working on a QuickTime editor recently. It's turning out nicely thanks
to Trevor's fine Enhanced QT external.  I'm creating it for WinXP and Vista.


I decided to go ahead and use SMIL, one of those oft-touted but apparently
seldom used XML standards, to do the QT preview compiles.

Well sure enough, it began to work as expected, and I was able to quickly
view the compilations of movie, image and sound snips in my QT player in
Rev. Sadly, I couldn't view the timeline slider, but that's another issue
altogether.

The trouble continued when I tried to export the movie into one
self-contained file. No matter how I tried, I was unable to configure
Trevor's external to output the entire movie flattened. At first I figured
it was a bug in the external export routine, but then I purchased QT Pro
($29 bucks down the drain- thanks Apple for your support), and found out
even Apple's own QT player couldn't accomplish such a simple task of
combining a single SMIL video and audio track into 1 exported movie.

Some Internet sleuthing and I found out, among other QuickTime shortcomings,
is Apple's very limited support for SMIL. And there is virtually no notes on
SMIL and the PC platform-- that is left for the developer to find out on
their own. Apparently, none of the 'special' tags work in Windows, only Mac.
One would think with Apple wanting large adoption of QT on PC's, they would
at least bother to spend the time documenting somewhere what it does and
doesn't do.

In anycase, I would recommend staying away from SMIL use and implementation
if you plan on either:

1) Using it on a PC with Apple's special tags (like the one to always show
the controller, which doesn't work) or;
2) You ever expect to need to export your SMIL generated movie as a
self-contained file on any platform.

Hope this prevents others from spending too much time in this particular
rabbit hole.

best, Chipp