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Tutorial: RealSystem G2 & SMIL

If you've been following our introduction to G2 and SMIL, you've probably already downloaded the Preview Edition of the G2 Player. Hopefully you've taken a look at some of the incredible media that has been produced with SMIL, RealPix and RealText. And of course you've looked at the incredible Razor's Edge video. If so, you've gotta be yearning to create some of that G2 content yourself. That's what this tutorial will do--get you started in the Wide World of true streaming multimedia presentations for the Web.

In this tutorial, we're going to focus on creating presentations with SMIL and RealPix. That's because unless you have some video that you've previously created, or you are talented in that medium already, you're not going to be producing any award winning videos after reading one quick-and-easy lesson. But you can create award winning presentations using the above technologies, and you can do so in a very short period of time.

With your new G2 Player at hand, check out my own G2 SMIL presentation, RainForestRiff. While it's by no means good enough to make Martin Scorcese lose any sleep at night, it may be good enough for others to enjoy.

It took me an hour to create from scratch, but if I had all the tools I needed when I started, as you will, it would've only taken me about 15 or 20 minutes. RainForestRiff utilizes RealPix for the images and fades, and the audio soundtrack is RealMedia. SMIL brings the two together for the G2 Player.

RealPix was developed by Iterated Systems as a part of the Sting image technology they were already developing. Sting enables developers to create lossless duplicates of images, supports multi-frame images (such as animated GIFs), and is perfect for streaming technology. The Sting format was designed so that if more data is available, the image may be larger with more detail. If less data is available, the image is still visible, but with less detail. Although RealNetworks has so far only made the Win32 version of RealPlayerG2 available, Iterated designed RealPix to work equally as well with Mac and Unix operating systems, so they probably won't be far behind.

[Move on to the next part of the article.]

This article first appeared in May, 1998.

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