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On 19 July 2010 16:23, Jason Webber <[log in to unmask]> wrote: I'm considering doing some audio slideshows similar to these on the bbc > http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7713115.stm > > Has anyone else tried anything similar, if so what are the experiences, > dangers and implications? > > I'm keen that they can be seen on mobile devices such as iPhones which > rules out Flash. Other than using Youtube are there any other credible ways > round this? > You could definitely do this with javascript and the <audio> tag (and using MP3 as the encoding format) - however it'd only work in fairly modern browsers (such as recent versions of Firefox, Chrome and Safari). It should work on the iPhone and newer versions of Android, and perhaps even via Opera on other mobiles. This is probably the most 'future-proof' way of doing it, and in theory the most accessible too (as browsers could offer the means to directly control the audio, and the slides could use text as well as image). It may be a bit too far-ahead for you for the time being though? Simplest and most cross-platform way of doing it is probably to simply create a video of the whole thing, and then encode it in a few different formats (H.264 for Safari/iPhone, WebM for Chrome/Firefox, etc) and then embed them all using the <video> tag (which lets browsers pick whichever format they prefer), with a Flash based embedded video as a fall-back for browsers that don't support the video tag. That should pretty much work in all browsers, and is what sites like YouTube and Vimeo are doing. Bit of a pain to have to use so many different encodings though... (which is why many people simply use one of those video hosting sites). Incidentally, whilst I agree with Mike that SMIL is pretty much dead, Timed Text as a simple format for subtitles is still being used. It's not supported directly by browsers, but the BBC's iPlayer service supports it within Flash (I don't know whether there are any javascript implementations). Here's the file from yesterday's News At One, for instance: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/subtitles/ng/b00t/5gz9/b00t5gz9_live.xml Frankie -- Frankie Roberto Experience Designer, Rattle 0114 2706977 http://www.rattlecentral.com **************************************************************** For mcg information visit the mcg website at http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/ To manage your subscription to this email list visit http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/email-list/ ****************************************************************