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Vijay Ghaskadvi

Vijay Ghaskadvi

Adobe

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Defining the problem
  3. SMIL-in-SMIL
  4. Online vs. offline
  5. Extending SMIL-in-SMIL to XML-in-SMIL
Created:
4 August 2008
User Level:
Intermediate
Products:
Media Player

Referencing external ad packages in AMODs using SMIL-in-SMIL and XSL

Adobe Media Player is a cross-platform media player that provides viewers with exciting new ways to discover and engage with their favorite content. It is a desktop application built on Adobe AIR and uses RSS-based syndication and aggregation of rich media content.

Adobe Media Player also creates unique new ways for content publishers to distribute and monetize their content through advertising. Various types of ads (pre-, mid- and post-roll, static or SWF banners and overlays) can be added around the main content, and have their impressions tracked. Specifying which ads will appear when and where is, at its root, a problem of spatial and temporal orchestration. The Adobe Media Orchestration Document (AMOD), an XML format inspired by Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL), is intended to solve exactly that problem.

While a generic SMIL document presents a blank canvas on which the document author can draw media elements such as images or audio/video assets by specifying coordinates, an AMOD can use only a predefined set of region names that map to physical regions on the Adobe Media Player UI. These region names can then be used with specific media elements (such as a video or img element) for defining their placement. Containers such as seq and par can be used to indicate execution in sequential order or in parallel with each other, respectively.

This article delves into some of the new features we have introduced in Adobe Media Player since we released version 1.0 back in April 2008. Specifically, I talk about SMIL-in-SMIL, a feature that allows AMOD authors to include nested references to other AMODs; and XML-in-SMIL, the more generalized form of SMIL-in-SMIL, where such included references point to arbitrary XML documents rather than valid AMODs.

Requirements

In order to make the most of this article, you need the following software:

Adobe Media Player

Prerequisite knowledge

This article assumes reasonable familiarity with the AMOD syntax as documented in the 1.0 Content Developer Kit.

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About the author

Vijay Ghaskadvi is a senior computer scientist at Adobe. He joined the Adobe Media Player team when the project was in its very early stages and is now primarily responsible for the technology around ad and publishing ecosystem enablement. Before joining the Adobe Media Player team, Vijay worked on a seed project in the Adobe Advanced Technology Lab as a senior server engineer, helping the team architect the server side of a workflow solution targeted towards small-to-medium businesses. Prior to Adobe, Vijay worked at a startup for several years as a principal engineer, leading the server team to build a web services–based solution for large enterprises.