Ambulant version 1.6

providing a reference SMIL 3.0 implementation

[2005-12-13, press release] We at Ambulant are pleased to announce the release of version 1.6 of the Ambulant Player. This release has been synchronized with the W3C's release today of SMIL 2.1.

Ambulant supports all of SMIL 2.1's features --and is the only public player available at any URI to do so! We support the new Mobile and Extended Mobile Profiles, as well as the updated SMIL 2.1 Language profile. As usual, open-source builds of Ambulant are available for: Linux, Mac OS X, Win32, Win-CE, and Win32-Tablet.

In addition to SMIL 2.1, there are some other interesting developments that have been included in this release:

• Rendering of HTML media items has been added, although with restrictions.
• Audio, video and rtsp support on Linux and MacOSX are greatly improved.
• Optionally Ambulant can use the BBC Dirac video codec.
• clipBegin and clipEnd are now supported for most continuous media types on most platforms.
• The build procedure for Linux/Mac has been enhanced, and support for pkg-config has been added.
• Developers: Initial support is provided for a plug-in version of Ambulant. At present, an experimental Firefox plug-in is available, along with a series of demo versions of documents. Many restrictions apply to this work, and feedback is appreciated.
• Developers: Ambulant is now distributed with an LGPL license instead of the previous GPL-with-exceptions licence.
• Developers: Ambulant can now play back from an external DOM tree.
• Developers: the Ambulant API is now available in Python. Both embedding in Python and extending in Python are suppported.
• Developers: the API has been rationalized in various places to support the two changes mentioned above.

We hope that you take a look at SMIL 2.1 and try the Ambulant Player.
We look forward to your feedback.
With best wishes for 2006,
 
The Ambulant Team at CWI