Real Networks - A Practical Guide to Video and Audio Compression - page 401

Figure 24-4 Helix movie player on the Symbian mobile operating system.
QuickTime and also does a lot of the things that you might have implemented in
Macromedia Flash.
Real Networks products are a good choice if you are creating video-led content with
some reasonably unsophisticated interactivity. Manufacturing SMIL files with Web-based
production systems is quite straightforward, and the components in them are just graph-
ics files and video streams, so the workflow is reasonably easy to set up. SMIL is only mar-
ginally more complex to create than HTML-based web pages.
There is a small downside to this approach. The components are gathered together
in a loosely organized collection but are not aggregated into a package in the same way as
QuickTime or MPEG-4. If your publishing system experiences a momentary outage pre-
venting an asset from being delivered to your server, the SMIL experience will be com-
promised. The missing asset would result in a broken link in your presentation. You may
be able to work around that by packing things into zip archives and then transferring them
as a whole. The public-facing server unpacks them for deployment. But this is more work
for your content-system engineers to do.
For those times when you want to produce something more complex, you have
Macromedia Flash or even MPEG-4 BIFS.