Ambulant

providing a reference SMIL 3.0 implementation

The Ambulant Open SMIL 2.0 Player is an open-source implementation of theSMIL 2.0 standard. It is intended for researchers who need source-code access to a complete SMIL player environment. It may also be used as a stand-alone SMIL player for applications that do not need proprietary media formats.

The player will support a range of SMIL 2.0 profiles, including desktop and mobile configurations based on specifications provided by the 3GPP Mobile Multimedia community. The player will be written in C++. Target implementations are for Linux and Windows implementations. A Mac OS-X implementation is also planned, depending on partner resources.

The target community for the Ambulant Player are developers of multimedia protocols, networks and infrastructures. Since building new infrastructure components is difficult enough, nobody seems to have time to integrate their work in a standard player environment. We want to build a platform that will encourage the development of comparable multimedia research output. By providing what we expect will be a standard baseline player, other researchers and development organizations can concentrate on integrating extensions to the basic player (either in terms of new media codecs or new network control algorithms). Other researchers can then have access to both the baseline player and the extensions. We hope that this will help results verification, improve the quality of multimedia research and stimulate growth in the multimedia research marketplace.

The Ambulant Player represents the first phase of a multi-year project aimed at improving network-level support for multimedia information processing.