Section: New Results

Multimedia Models and Formats

SMIL timesheets

With the advent of HTML5 and its support in most popular browsers, HTML is becoming an important multimedia language. Video and audio can now be embedded in HTML pages without worrying about the availability of plugins. However, a major issue is to specify the dynamic behavior of documents (user interactions, timing and synchronization with continuous contents). This is done usually by writing (often complex) scripts, which require programming skills from the authors.

To address this issue, we have created the timesheets.js library, (http://wam.inrialpes.fr/timesheets/ ) a scheduler that allows HTML documents to be animated and synchronized in a purely declarative way. This work is based on the SMIL Timing and Synchronization module and the SMIL Timesheets specification, with a few extensions.

The library is implemented in JavaScript, which makes it usable in any browser. Authors can specify the dynamic behavior of HTML5 (+CSS3) documents [6] . They can thus develop multimedia applications without writing a single line of JavaScript. Timesheets can also be used with other XML document languages, such as SVG for instance. This approach was validated in a class with students learning web multimedia [5] .

Multimedia content adaptation

Multimedia documents may have to be played on multiple devices such as mobile phones, tablets, desktop computers, set-top boxes, etc. Usage and platform diversity requires documents to be adapted according to execution contexts, sometimes unpredictable at design time. In a joint work with project-team Exmo, we have designed a semantic adaptation framework for multimedia documents. This framework captures the semantics of document composition and transforms the relations between media objects according to adaptation constraints [3] .