Progess report June 2005

providing a reference SMIL 3.0 implementation

Ambulant version 1.4

In May, 2005, the Ambulant project released version 1.4 of the Ambulant Open SMIL player. This version is the first public implementation of the new W3C SMIL 2.1CR recommendation for Mobile multimedia players. The Ambulant implementation was used as the basis of the W3C's interoperability testing of the new SMIL standard: Ambulant implements all of the new language extensions and remains the most complete SMIL player available anywhere. The Ambulant player is available for Linux, Mac OS X, Win32, Win32 Tablet, and WinCE.

Daisy Talking Book

In May, the Ambulant team also participated in a meeting with the Daisy Consortium on the development of a player for the new Daisy Talking Book standard (DTB). The DTB is the main vehicle for delivering content to blind and dyslexic readers worldwide. This summer, the Ambulant player core will be integrated with the AMIS DTB reader to better serve the needs of blind users who want access to complex multimedia content.

Holland Open Source Conference

The Ambulant group provided two presentations at the recent Holland Open Source Conference in Amsterdam: one presentation provided our vision for converging media platform support and the other provided a set of SMIL examples that showcased the facilities of the Ambulant platform. The group, via our research institute CWI, have been busy integrating Ambulant in a number of external projects. More on these results in a future report.

Plans for the near future

The next Ambulant release is expected in September. At that time, we expect to deliver media extensions for better video support on Linux and PocketPC systems and we expect to provide a full public test suite for the various SMIL Mobile and Desktop profiles. We also hope to have an initial release of a Symbian SMIL player at that time.