Overview

SMIL (pronounced "smile") stands for Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, and it's a World Wide Web Consortium standard for describing multimedia presentations.

QuickTime 4.1 and later can play SMIL presentations as if they were QuickTime movies, so you can use SMIL to create multimedia presentations that play from the desktop or over the Web using the QuickTime plug-in or QuickTime Player.

Introduction to SMIL and QuickTime

A SMIL presentation is a lot like a QuickTime movie it can display images, text, audio, and video; it can position visual elements on the screen at specified locations; and media elements can be sequenced and synchronized in time.

SMIL presentations are described by SMIL documents text files that specify what media elements to present, and where and when to present them.

Media elements in a SMIL document are specified by URLs. Media elements can be files such as text files, JPEG images, and QuickTime movies or live streams. The URLs that specify the media elements can use any of the common protocols HTTP, FTP, RTSP, local file access, and so on.

You can import SMIL documents into QuickTime and play them using the QuickTime browser plug-in or QuickTime Player, provided that their individual media elements are all things that QuickTime can play.

When you import a SMIL presentation into QuickTime, the SMIL media elements...