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In This Article: • G2 How-To • SMIL Takes The Reins • Synchronizing Media Types • RealPix Calls The Images • RealText Calls The Text • Rants And Raves Print this story Send as e-mail Come explore a tutorial explanation of RealNetworks’ synchronized streaming-media system. By Leah Goldberg, WebTools (08/11/98) This is the second in a series of articles on RealNetworks' G2 streaming-media system. The first, an introduction to G2, ran in May. Now producer Leah Goldberg walks us through the process her team used to create a daily G2 show, TechWeb Today. When RealNetworks introduced the preview version of its G2 player in June, it offered its content partners (those that had a button on the player itself), a few basic G2 templates to help create simple presentations. Many partners used those templates, but to create TechWeb's daily streaming-media show, TechWeb Today, we decided to slave over the hot code and build a unique show from scratch. We wanted to take advantage of the capabilities of this new streaming-multimedia platform. In this article, I'll talk about the steps we took to build our show, examine some of our code, and relate some problems we encountered along with the work-arounds we implemented. Deciding What To Show The first step to constructing a G2 presentation is to establish your content plan and graphic design. You have to determine what media and data types you plan to use. Will your show contain a video, or will you instead present your information in the form of a slide show with an associated audio track? Will you stream information as text, or will you make and stream graphics that contain text? We decided to develop a segmented presentation to offer a more targeted user experience. Instead of a linear news program, our show is comprised of four five-minute distinct segments: an introductory segment and three topical sub-channels. This is TechWeb Today's introductory screen. The daily news-update video plays in the center-left portion of the display window. Links on the right take users to three channels. The introductory segment begins by announcing the day's programming on the sub-channels, then offers a three-minute video newscast. Viewers can click to visit any sub-channel during or at the end of the presentation. All three sub-channels have the same basic structure: While a video plays, text and explanatory graphics augment the video. Once you have established your basic content plan and design, the next step is to roll up your sleeves and start coding to build the presentation piece by piece. To do that, start with a Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) file, which we'll discuss next. Leah Goldberg is a producer for TechWeb. [SMIL Takes The Reins>>>] Page 1 of 6

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