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Just wanted to say thank you to all who replied to my post about audio
slideshows, it was really handy and has given me lots to think about.

Cheers.

Jason Webber
Web Manager
Exploring 20th Century London
Tel: 020 7814 5596
www.20thcenturylondon.org.uk <http://www.20thcenturylondon.org.uk> 




Jason Webber
Web Manager, Exploring 20th Century London
Museum of London
150 London Wall
London. EC2Y 5HN
Tel: 020 7814 5596
Fax: 020 7600 1058
Email: [log in to unmask]
www.museumoflondon.org.uk

Discover the story of the world's greatest city and its people at the new ?20 million Galleries of Modern London, now open at Museum of London. 

Find out more at www.museumoflondon.org.uk 

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-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Frankie Roberto
Sent: 20 July 2010 11:36
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: audio slideshows

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

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