[PYTHONMAC-SIG] What are people doing with MacPython

[Jack Jansen]

Recently, powers@petroglyph.com (Michael Powers) said:
> 
> Jack, your multimedia work sounds interesting? Can you say more?

There are quite some papers on CMIFed and the Amsterdam Hypermedia
Model (on which it is loosely based) available at
ftp://ftp.cwi.nl/pub/mmpapers, but I can give a quick outline here.

A cmif document is a hierarchical structure, with parallel and
sequential composition. This structure gives the coarse timing
relations, with finer control possible through a mechanism called sync
arcs. The leaf nodes, which are the actual media items being played,
contain a reference to the data (usually stored outside the cmif
document, in a media-dependent form) and a "channel" on which the mode
should be played. Channels are abstract devices: there are sound
channels which can play audio files, text and html channels which show
text, movie channels, image channels, etc. The on-screen channels also
hold information about layout, background color, etc.

CMIF supports hyperlinks, and has a concept of "context" to allow the
author to specify what should happen when a hyperjump is taken
(replace whole current presentation with a new one, start a second
asynchronous presentation, replace part of the current presentation
with a new one, etc). This all fits in nicely in the tree through the
use of a choice composition node (similar to the sequential and
parallel composition).

One of the primary design goals was transportability of documents. The
tree model helps a lot here (higher level of abstraction, and hence
much easier to adapt playout to a platform than a timeline model), and
there's also various other bits and pieces: many image/sound/video
formats are supported, data items can be referenced by URL, etc.

--
Jack Jansen             | ++++ stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal ++++
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http://www.cwi.nl/~jack | see http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/spg-l/sigaction.htm 

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