QT + SMIL = BAD COMBO

[Andre Garzia]

Chipp,

I also went lost on that road before. I found that RealPlayer support
for SMIL is better than apple, so people wanting to really use SMIL
can move to RP or use a Flash Media Player, many support some SMIL.

As for QT, it appears that there's a lot of half baked features. It's
flash support is broken, it's hotspot support could be better, the
SMIL support is odd... sometimes it feels like QT is hacked together
instead of grown with a plan.

I also paid for QT Pro and really wish Apple would gives a better
editing tool as QT Pro users, QT Player editing feels like a toy. I
can't recall how many times I went to Final Cut Pro on the university
to do simple and silly movie editing that QT Pro should handle in an
easy way.

:-/

bad bad apple.

Andre

On 12/1/07, Chipp Walters <chipp at chipp.com> wrote:
> 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
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http://www.andregarzia.com All We Do Is Code.