Welcome to the SMILab!

Right now you will just find a collection of older and current projects that need a home! This is their new home :-)

This site is devoted to researching and implementing the use of Sychronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) for a variety of uses, including teaching, education, audio and video indexing, multimedia presentations and anything else we can find to do with this amazingly simple little markup language created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Sample Projects

RealVideo 9 Demonstration- this is the "We're Texas" video, encoded in RealVideo 9 at 768K, 640X480, 30 fps.

"The History of Indexing"- this is a project I did as a student in our "Indexing and Abstracting" class in April of 1999.

"Opening remarks at the Telecommunications and Information Technology Summit" by UT-Austin President Larry Faulkner, 5 May 1999. Runtime is 7 minutes and 5 seconds. Simultaneous Spanish and English captioning.

"Graduation with a SMIL"- gotta pay the bills, and do what the boss lady says.

Statistics Tutorials- this is a comparison of streaming media platforms in use here at GSLIS.

Now the fun really begins! Teaching this stuff to others!

Search Engine Showdown- This is a tutorial matrix created by my TA, Amy Degner, for use in our LIS 312 class. It compares different search engine interfaces and features, and uses SMIL to create a playlist to create a sequence of overviews.

This link will take you to a student projects page, where I taught video indexing using SMIL in April of 2001. At the top of the page is a link to a tutorial I created to teach the students basic SMIL indexing. The first projects are old interview with past Deans of our school, that I found cleaning out a multimedia cabinet. The VHS tape had nearly rotted, so the video quality is pretty bad.
The People's Palace is a really wonderful piece about the New York Public Library, lovingly indexed by two of my students. WARNING: This can be really hard to watch right now....

"The Internet-Behind the Web" is a History Channel production that we have permission to use in teaching here at GSLIS. It will not be linked in here long, but I wanted you to see the latest iteration of video indexing that we have come up with. Rather than a static layout, this uses a scrolling index that runs to about 8 pages of index! These students did a great job on this, and it makes an otherwise great video a lot easier to use in teaching. The Mac player does not do well with this, but it works fine on a PC.