GRiNS Quick Start Guide
Contents
1. cssssssssscessesssssssscesessssecesseesseseesoesesssseceseeesseseeceeseeseoees iii Table of Contents ccssssssssssesssssssssesssssssssssssssssssnsessssssssssesessessnenseeesseneneess v GRiNS Version 1 0 Distribution Roadmap ssessesseesessssseeseesesssosceseeseessosees vii Distribution Package Contents cciconicnnnnnnnnnnnnannnnnncnnananonnnncnnononncncononaracncnoos vii GRINS Quick Start Guide yor iiien eaeoe enota lindes viii Introduction serorea A A A A E A E 1 Installing and Running GRINS for SMIL sesseessesssseeseessessosseseeseessosseseeesess 3 Obtaining GRINS SMIL sessar aini e a a aa a a 3 Installing GRINS siii ia 3 Installing GRiNS on Windows 95 98 NT 4 0 systems sses 4 Installing GRiNS on the Apple Macintosh n sssssssnsennennesnsseennssrsesensnsenennesss 4 Installing GRINS under UNIX ococicccccacicinioninnaninnonanininnanccnanincnroncananincinnonano 5 Using the GRINS SMIL Player sussie tusiina 6 Using the GRINS Editor i ia tere eea aa na ducado talas 8 A Bird s Eye View of the GRINS Editor ssessesesssesseeseseesseoreesessesscoreesessesse 9 A Note for Macintosh and UNIX Users ooccccococociciccnononccncnonanannnonononanananononoso 11 Apple Macintosh ici a a a ARA 11 SGliand SUN UNIX NOES esikoe decada calar cd acia 11 An Overview of the GRiNS Authoring Views cocioconinnononinnnocnnanarininononoss 12 The Player View The Embedded Presentation Previewer nossos 12 The Structure View The Logical View of a P2. Irix Solaris d NT 6 3 25 image ief no no no no image jpeg jpeg jpg yes yes yes yes image naplps no no no no image png png yes 2 yes yes yes image tiff tiff tif yes yes yes yes image x portable any pnm no yes yes yes map image x portable bit pbm no yes yes yes map image x portable pgm no yes yes yes graymap image x portable pix ppm no yes yes yes map image x rgb rgb yes yes yes yes image x xbitmap xbm no yes yes yes image x xpixmap xpm no no no no image x xwindow xwd yes no no no dump bmp yes yes yes yes fts no no no no pm no no no no 28 GRINS for SMIL Quick Start Guide Windows SGI Sun IME y me th Extensions 95 98 Mac Irix Solaris yp NT 6 3 2 5 ras yes no no no tga yes no no no video mpeg mpeg mpg yes yes yes yes 6 video quicktime qt yes yes yes no video x msvideo avi yes yes yes no 5 5 video x sgi movie mov no no yes no text html html htm yes 7 yes yes yes 4 3 text plain txt yes yes yes yes Notes 1 Uncompressed WAV only 2 Support seems to be somewhat buggy 3 Very limited 4 HTML 2 0 only 5 Not all encodings supported 6 With Quicktime 3 or QT MPEG extension installed 7 Both IE4 5 and WebsterPro controls supported GRiNS Quick Reference Information 29 Support for RealMedia G2 Data Types The following chart describes the levels of support provided in the GRiNS G2 version fo
3. GRiNS SMIL distribution package consists of the following components e GRINS for SMIL Quick Start Guide an overview of the installation instructions for GRINS and a quick tour of the basics of the GRINS Environment This is this guide e Templates a set of templates used in the GRiNS Tutorial Guide and which you may use to build you own presentations e Examples a collection of SMIL demonstrations some of which are referenced in the Quick Start Guide e GRiNS Icons a directory containing Icons used by the GRiNS Editor e Software depending on the distribution you downloaded a GRINS distribution for Windows 95 98 NT the Apple Macintosh or UNIX Once you have installed GRiNS you will be given information on how to obtain the GRiNS SMIL Tutorial Guide a step by step description on how you can use both basic and advanced features of GRiNS These are not included in the standard distribution because of the size of the tutorial documents themselves They are available for free download from GRINS Web site GRINS Version 1 0 Distribution Roadmap vii GRiNS Quick Start Guide The GRiNS SMIL Quick Start Guide will help you learn how to make SMIL presentations easily and quickly It is divided into four sections 1 Introduction to GRiNS and GRiNS SMIL a description of the GRINS architecture and a discussion on how you can protect your authoring investment by using the GRINS multi targeting approach to presentation design and mainte
4. PDF formats Consult the documentation provided with your GRiNS Editor access key to find the current set of tutorials for your version of GRiNS If you purchased the GRiNS Editor for SMIL you will also receive information on obtaining a copy of the GRiNS User Manual and the GRiNS Reference Manual These manuals which are not provided with the Test Drive or Beta evaluation versions provide a wealth of detailed information on using GRINS to solve practical tasks in creating either template based or full featured presentations using GRINS The GRINS Web site www oratrix com GRiNS provides a set of release notes and issues reports for each version of the GRiNS Editor and Player releases This site also contains a publicly available version of the GRINS Frequently Asked Questions list and errata to this and other GRINS publications If you purchased GRiNS you will have had the opportunity to enroll for our automatic notification service for the version s of GRINS you acquired We welcome your comments criticisms compliments and suggestions You can reach us at grins documentation oratrix com We hope you find working with GRiNS a productive experience Where Next 31
5. W3C Structured Multimedia Integration Language SMIL We refer to this version as GRINS SMIL Presentations created with the GRiNS SMIL Editor can be played on any SMIL compliant player such as the RealNetworks G2 player the GRINS Player or the Helios Soja player Note that each player may have restrictions on the types of data encodings it supports The RealNetworks G2 player for example is geared to the efficient rendering of RealMedia s streaming data types RealAudio RealVideo RealText RealFlash and RealPix while the GRiNS Player is designed for the use of a wide range of conventional non streaming data types You should choose a player based on the needs of your target audience The GRINS architecture allows you to build a single presentation specification which can be directly or indirectly tailored to run on many main stream presentation platforms In most cases you can purchase a GRiNS Editor environment that is matched to the capabilities of a particular format A presentation created with one GRiNS environment such as GRINS SMIL can be accepted as input to other GRiNS environments and then further processed to meet the constraints of that environment 2 GRINS for SMIL Quick Start Guide Installing and Running GRiNS for SMIL GRiNS for SMIL GRiNS SMIL is available on Windows based PCs Apple Macintosh and UNIX computers Each implementation of GRiNS has been developed to meet the expectations of the user communit
6. is a multi view editor This means that you can look at and manipulate a document from several perspectives depending on the task you wish to accomplish One of the GRiNS views is the Player View This is the run time view of a document Where the separate GRiNS Player allows a complete presentation to be viewed using conventional start stop pause controls the embedded previewer that drives the Player view allows you to play sub parts of a document anything from a complex sub presentation to a single media object can be activated at any time This is a tremendous productivity enhancement tool during authoring The main GRiNS Editor view is the Structure View In the Structure view you can manipulate the general structure of your presentation in a visual way The GRINS Editor isolates you from the details of SMIL or any other format leaving you with an intuitive means of putting together presentations based on a standard set of presentation building blocks The Structure view is the default view you get when a presentation is loaded into the editor GRiNS also has a Timeline View The Timeline view is generated for you by the GRiNS Editor With the Timeline view you can define detailed timing relationships among components using the GRINS Synchronization Arcs or sync arcs Sync arcs give you explicit and exact control of the timing within your presentation when it really matters Screen space and audio channels are managed in GRINS via th
7. the GRiNS Editor initially The Player View The Embedded Presentation Previewer The place to start with GRiNS is to preview the demos supplied in the Examples folder located in the main GRINS program folder Executing these demos will also help you determine if there are any installation problems with GRINS on your environment if these demos execute without problems chances are good that the installation went well To play a particular demo either drag the demo file onto the GRiNS Editor icon or open the editor via the command line the desktop or the Start Menu depending on your version of GRiNS and then load a demo via the Open option in the File menu of the Editor The following demos are located in the Stroll set in the GRINS Examples folder e stroll1 smil shows a sequence of unformatted sequential images e stroll2 smil shows these images in sequence in a specific layout on the screen e stroll3 smil show media objects being played in Parallel as well as in sequence e stroll4 smil adds sound to the presentation e stroll5 smil uses sync arcs to allow more accurate timing to take place e stroll6 smil provides hyperlinks from an image to other parts of the presentation GRINS takes a different approach to creating presentations than most timeline or text based systems so getting to know the nature of GRINS now will help you to become more productive in the future 12 GRINS for SMIL Quick Start Guide To start a present
8. view Getting Ready to Create Documents The GRINS Editor provides many ways to view a presentation While the range of views may seem complex each has been defined to localize a set of critical tasks that are an important part of the document creation process The GRiNS Work Flow Model To review how the GRiNS Editor works consider this e The Structure View is the main editing view for a presentation created with the GRINS Editor It helps you to quickly and easily define relationships among data objects and allows you to define structure containers that help you organize edit and maintain your presentation e The Timeline view is generated automatically for you from the Structure View by the GRiNS Editor The Timeline view is used to specify detailed synchronization and resource allocation options in a document Depending on the player you choose the Timeline View is used to help you plan how and when critical resources such as presentation bandwidth is used during the presentation e The Layout View allows you to define maintain and cluster visual and auditory resources used in the presentation e The Hyperlink View allows you to create and manage links within the presentation The view also allows you to control how anchors and links are presented in the other GRINS views e The Player View allows you to see how your work in progress is developing If you use the separate GRINS Player the actual presentation will be identical t
9. you open a presentation the Editor gives you a picture of the relationship among the objects in that presentation We call this the Structure View The Structure view can be very simple for simple presentations or it can be a complex presentation roadmap for large complex presentations The following annotated view show the basic components of the Structure View top level expose collapse parallel p tab p fal Structure View Untitled2 container Switch i container sequential O container audio object image references object references Text object reference This picture describes a presentation named Slideshow and which contains three images played in sequence which are presented in parallel with one Text object containing text comments and either an English language or Spanish language audio object the selection of which will be determined by a user preference in the player Please re read the last paragraph and look closely at the image if you understand the correspondence then you already understand the basics of GRINS 14 GRINS for SMIL Quick Start Guide The purpose of the Structure view is to give a logical projection of the contents in a presentation to the author An important and unique feature of the Structure view is that time flows from top to bottom elements that are activated in parallel are placed next to each other while elements executing in sequence are shown top to bottom The alternatives in a s
10. A Help nenga Close Chrlew Cascade Tile Horizontally Tile Vertically Player Structure view Timeline view Layout view Hyperlinks Source Each of these views will be briefly introduced in this section The GRINS Tutorial Guide provides you with some simple tutorials that show how and when these views are used to help you quickly efficiently and easily make us of the full power of SMIL 10 GRINS for SMIL Quick Start Guide A Note for Macintosh and UNIX Users Although GRINS is available for Windows Macintosh and UNIX platforms this Quick Start Guide provides illustrations and examples drawn only from the Windows version We have done this to minimize the document s size Most of the dialogs and menus are identical on all three platforms so this guide can be used for all three platforms However users of the Mac and UNIX versions should keep the differences summarized below in mind Apple Macintosh The Macintosh has only a single button mouse Where the text refers to a selection using the right mouse button you should substitute a CTRL click selection instead Contextual menus selected with right mouse on windows will pop up on the Macintosh if you keep the mouse button depressed for about half a second The Macintosh does not have the concept of windows within windows hence each open view has its own window There is one point where this can be slightly confusing it is possible to have a document open but no views
11. GRINS Player for previewing your presentation while it is being created e EH 3rd party content creation tools HTM di hi plain id structured audio graphics font video font GRiNS Environment y y y GRINS Editor GRINS Previewer gt lt gt lt gt lt RealSystem HTML TIME Microsoft Quicktime DAVIC RealServer engine MediaServer File File RealSystem Microsoft Quicktime Set Top Box G2 player browser MediaPlayer player player 3rd party rendering systems The illustration above shows the GRINS architecture Fundamental to GRINS is that the complex task of presentation authoring should be partitioned so that the user has the freedom required to build and manage presentations easily At the assets end the author should work with the asset types management tools and editors that best meet the requirements of the task at hand GRiNS works with the databases and editors that the author has available At the presentation end Introduction 1 GRINS allows presentations to be exported to popular streaming media servers or to be converted to popular stand alone formats Presentations for some formats like SMIL can also be played directly by the GRiNS Player whether or not they were made with the GRINS Editor This GRINS for SMIL Quick Start Guide describes GRINS for W3C SMIL a version of GRiNS tailored to the
12. Quick Start Guide functions are also presented on the menu bar The Play menu also allows you to select visible channels this is a GRiNS specific functionality The Window pull down menu allows you to close the entire presentation view and the Help menu gets you access to the on line help files In all cases inactive menu selections are grayed out in the menus Most presentations do not start upon loading you must explicitly press the start button on the top control bar You should look at the demonstration programs provided for GRINS see the release notes for details to obtain confidence in using the player If you did not purchase the GRiNS Editor you can write your own programs directly in SMIL or you can play SMIL compliant presentation created with other authoring environments NOTES 1 The current version of GRiNS supports standard information types for the platform being executed on The Player directly executes formats such as RealAudio RealVideo RealText and RealPix via the RealNetworks G2 player in this release In order to execute RealMedia datatypes you must have the G2 player installed on your system A compatibility table is given in the References section of this Guide 2 Viewing HTML pages is made possible via an HTML control embedded in the application For information on the configuration of the HTML control on various platforms please see the release notes that come with your version of the Player 3 System ma
13. Showing Resource Use During a Presentation The Timeline view of a presentation shows various aspects of the temporal relationships among data objects within a presentation Where the Structure view shows the high level logical relationships among parts of the presentation which is the perspective that an author usually has the Timeline view looks at a presentation in terms of how and when objects actually get activated it gives insight into how a presentation renderer will actually execute the presentation An annotated Timeline view is shown below which also contains a piece of the Player window to provide some context for the Timelines This view corresponds to the run time projection of the Structure View shown in the last section PEL d Rin d PLT ES File Edit Play Linking View Window Help ASEO a imi slideshow switch s N lt wl Spanish Audio Sk alternatives gt media objects resource aft channels al Y resource type icons syne are virtual timeline The elements of the Timeline view are arranged in resource order The primary resources in a multimedia presentation are either screen space or audio rendering spaces that is left right or stereo audio channels In SMIL this ordering corresponds roughly to a listing by SMIL s Regions The channel icon is shown at left It is a rectangular icon containing the channel name and media type The type corresponds to the media type being manag
14. allation process From the Software Manager or inst select the subsystems you want to install gt grins sw player contains the GRiNS Player only software and is required gt grinsed sw editor contains the GRiNS Editor and is required gt grinsed sw player contains the GRINS Player and is required gt grins help contains help information and is recommended gt grins relnotes contains the release notes and is also recommended Important Note You need superuser root privileges to use the inst installation method The GRiNS Player and Editor and the supporting files will be installed in usr local grins 2 Using grins tar gz or grinsed tar gz If you don t have super user privileges download the appropriate file grins tar gz for the Player only version of GRINS and grinsed tar gz for the Editor and Player and extract it in a directory of your choice The command to do this is something like this gzip cd grins tar gz tar xf for the GRiNS Player or gzip cd grinsed tar gz tar xf for the GRINS Editor The tar file contains the same files as the tardist files and in the same relative configuration SunOS 5 5 Solaris 2 5 Installing and Running GRiNS for SMIL The Sun version of GRINS is distributed as a gzipped Tar archive To install the GRINS Player for SunOS 5 5 Solaris 2 5 simply ungzip the file into a target directory and then un Tar the file to the place where you want GRINS to reside on your sys
15. art at that point and continue playing through the rest of the presentation s objects To view the entire presentation select the Play option from the Play menu Selecting the Play short cut will reactivate the last type of Play mode you selected Play Play node or Play from node The Structure view is the default Editor view It can be activated by selecting Structure view from the Window menu The Structure view can be closed by using standard windows techniques for your platform Notes 1 There are often several ways of selection a GR NS editing function you can use the pull down menus across the top of the Editor you often can use the context menus under the right mouse button or you can make use of the keyboard equivalents for most commands See the GRINS Reference Manual for details 2 The keyboard equivalents have been customized to meet the expectations of experienced users on each of the platforms upon which GRiNS is implemented The structure of the menus is constant across all versions of GRiNS in as far as they are relevant for those platforms 3 If a nested structure container is selected when Play from node is requested only the objects activated at or after the selected node will be activated GRiNS Use Tip If you select Play gt Play Node for an image or text file the image text will only appear if its duration is explicitly defined in the node 16 GRINS for SMIL Quick Start Guide The Timeline View
16. ation after it is loaded select Play from the Play menu or click on the VCR like start button on the short cuts bar of the editor window strolll GRINS Editor GRINS 3PEile Edit Play Linking View Window Help eins DISMESSI GRINS Player View Shortcut Bar window AMSTERDAM CANALS ws Nae Rendering of Presentation The Player view is opened whenever any form of Play is selected from Play Menu The view can be activated removed at anytime by selecting deselecting Player from the View menu NOTES 1 There are three versions of each of the stroll files in the examples stroll sub folder stroll smil containing black and white images stroll c smil containing color images and stroll sw smil containing a SMIL switch statement that based on BITRATE decides which version is appropriate 2 If the Player view is already open and another view covers the Player view the Player view is not automatically brought to the front of the editing window when Play is selected If you don t see the Player view make sure some other view is not hiding it from you 3 The default view in the editor the Structure View will pop up on open You can either close it using the standard window techniques for your system or you can leave it on the screen the Player View will be displayed on top of the Structure View A Bird s Eye View of the GRiNS Editor 13 The Structure View The Logical View of a Presentation When
17. e Layout view This view allows you to define properties of individual SMIL regions and it allows you to control resource use via extended regions properties These areas are GRiNS Layout Channels You can also group collections of layout channels into sets called GRiNS Screens A Screen bundles all of the regions can you want to display in one part of a presentation This mechanism allows you to create visually interesting presentation easily and quickly with GRiNS e GRINS provides powerful Hypermedia support through the Hyperlink View Within this view you can define anchors across media objects and then define various types of links between these anchors Of course if the underlying media types support links such as HTML then you can use these in addition to the SMIL level links provided by GRiNS GRINS also provides full support for building adaptive presentations using the SMIL switch statements The semantics and properties of the SMIL switch are managed in several GRINS views as is illustrated below Here again GRINS worries about the syntax you simply need to define the options available You can select a particular view in two ways some views open automatically when you perform certain functions in the Editor such as selecting Play or opening a new presentation You can always turn a particular view on via the Windows menu bar as shown in the following illustration Untitled GRINS Editor File Edit Play Linking View
18. e basic types of container objects used in the Structure view are color coded for easy recognition With a bit of practice you can build a mental picture of your presentation without ever hitting Play but since GRINS lets you play anything from a single node to an entire presentation during editing save those brain cells for other activity You can perform nearly all of the editing operations required to create most basic presentations from within the Structure view You can add move cut copy and paste objects both data objects and structure containers using the menu options or right mouse short cuts You can define SMIL switch directives and identify the A Bird s Eye View of the GRiNS Editor 15 alternatives associated with the switch You can create basic hyperlinks between nodes in the presentation You can zoom in or zoom out of parts of the Structure view You can also access all of the properties of each of the objects in the Structure view for detailed control of the presentation When possible a thumbnail image of either the contents or the type of data objects is shown in the Structure view If the view becomes too crowded these thumbnails are removed You may influence this behavior via the GRINS View menu You can select any object in the Structure View and then select the Play node function from the Play menu to preview that object or structure container If you select Play from node instead the presentation will st
19. ed by the channel resource In A Bird s Eye View of the GRiNS Editor 17 left to right timeline order each of the media objects for that resource are shown in the Timeline graph GRiNS provides management attributes for each channel you can see these attributes by right clicking on the channel icon When playing a presentation the Timeline view shows resource use for the standard GRiNS Player It lets you know when individual objects get fetched by the player this is shown by an amber color when a particular node is enabled for presentation this is shown by a light green color and when a particular node is actually being presented this is shown by a dark green coloring Each node is shown as a solid picture or it is shown as a picture containing a diagonal line The diagonal line means that the type of object shown does not have an explicit duration but that its duration has been calculated by the GRINS scheduler The details of this scheduling can be complex and interested readers are referred to the W3C SMIL 1 0 Standard for more details A blue arrow in the Timeline graph shows a GRINS sync arc This arc defines a particular timing property between two objects in the timing graph Sync arcs should be thought of as temporal annotations that define how two elements are scheduled You can say for example that one element should start 6 3 seconds after the other By using the sync arc you don t need to count frames in the timeba
20. gions to organize screen and other resources in the presentation If you use only these regions you will typically not need to visit the Layout view For more complex presentation or when creating your own templates the Layout view provides a means of creating sizing editing and placing SMIL regions The following illustration shown an annotated Layout view Player ExtendedSlideshow2 GRINS Editor File Edit Play Linking View Window Help Ose eS a gt I ele imi slideshow Player view with regions highlighted GRiNS Layouts only default is shown 0 0 320 256 Layout channels in this Layout Other available Layout channels al Layout view New Rename Delete New When activated the Layout view shows a window similar to the GRiNS Player window and a separate editing window for adding and updating layout areas In 20 GRINS for SMIL Quick Start Guide GRINS terminology these areas are called Layout Channels Layout Channels carry more properties than standard SMIL Regions This information carried transparently within a SMIL file When activated the Layout view consists of a version of the Player view in which the individual regions allocated in that view are highlighted and a window for managing the resources associated with each region In short GRiNS allows a user to cluster different sets of regions together into GRINS Layouts A presentation can be assigned t
21. hors within a node either a data node or a structure node and you can associate links with each of these anchors Unlike HTML links SMIL links can be bi directional SMIL links also have the ability to be attached to whole nodes or to parts of a node An annotated Hyperlink view is shown in the following illustration ial Structure View Extended Slideshow2 Es LIX Links Anchors Node picture_1 El a E i 10 Edit Push fopus Delete Anchor editor di destination anchors Links with type The Hyperlink view shows a collection of source anchors on the left of the display and destination anchors on the right You can add links of several types by first selecting a source anchor then a link type and then the destination anchor SMIL allows you to define several types of anchors and links in a presentation Each of these are supported by the GRiNS Editor You should consult the GRiNS User Guide and GRiNS Reference Manual for full details 22 GRINS for SMIL Quick Start Guide Notes 1 Simple hyperlinks between complete objects the so called whole node anchors and simple links can be made directly from the Structure and Timeline views The Hyperlink view is intended primarily for more complex links 2 Individual media objects may contain internal links For example a HTML page may contain links within that page or to other pages At present these anchors and links are not shown in the Hyperlink
22. les 4 In the Windows release the file extensions smi and smil are claimed by GRINS The assignment will be made optional in a future release Installing GRiNS on the Apple Macintosh To install the GRiNS Player only or Editor Player distributions for the Macintosh you should download the self extracting installer for the version you want During installing nothing is placed in the System Folder except a small preferences file so removing GRiNS can be done by moving the entire distribution folder to the Macintosh Trash icon 4 GRINS for SMIL Quick Start Guide Installing GRiNS under UNIX GRINS is currently supported for Silicon Graphics SGI IRIX 6 3 and later systems and under Sun s SunOS 5 5 Solaris 2 5 The SGI and Sun versions supports both the GRINS Player and the GRiNS Editor Silicon Graphics IRIX 6 3 and later For IRIX 6 3 and later on SGI systems you have two options when installing the GRiNS Editor and Player using the SGI inst tools or using the gzipped Tar distribution 1 Using grins tardist or grinsed tardist Download the file grins tardist for the Player only or grinsed tardist for the Editor and Player If your browser is setup correctly it will start the SGI Software Manager automatically If not you can extract the tardist file in a new directory and start the Software Manager swmgr or inst manually Point either program to the directory with the extracted files reside to start the inst
23. nance 2 Installing and Running GRiNS a overview of how to load GRiNS on to your system and what to expect when you load a SMIL presentation in the GRINS Editor or GRiNS Player 3 Bird s Eye View of GRiNS a quick tour of the basics of the GRINS SMIL environment Spending five minutes here will get you ready to create and edit complex presentations without ever having to type a single line of SMIL code 4 GRiNS Editor Quick Reference an overview of the data types supported by the GRiNS environment and other useful reference information for getting started with the GRiNS Editor or the GRiNS Player Each of the sections has been written to be relatively stand alone but we suggest that you read them all to get a good overview of the system Most people find it useful for example to learn about installing the system before trying to use it Once you install GR NS you should obtain the GRiNS Tutorial Guide which provides a step by step introduction to building your own presentations After you get experience working with GRiNS you should read the GRiNS SMIL User s Guide and the GRiNS SMIL Reference Manual for more detailed information on how SMIL and GRiNS can support your presentation development needs viii GRINS for SMIL Quick Start Guide Introduction GRINS is an authoring and player environment for Web based multimedia documents It is available as the stand alone GRiNS Player or as the GRiNS Editor which includes an embedded
24. nufacturers may load system libraries DLLs or their equivalent on non Windows systems that enhance the media experience to a degree that playback via standard GRiNS drivers is not possible See the release notes section of the GRiNS on line documentation if you encounter problems Installing and Running GRiNS for SMIL 7 Using the GRiNS Editor If the GRINS Editor was successfully installed a window with the following menu and activation options is presented GRINS Editor iof ES File Edit Play Linking View Window Help D amp td The pull down menus contain functions that allow you to create and preview SMIL documents The pull down menus contain all of the functionality of the Player with extensions to create save and maintain documents The Linking menu allows you to create and manage links within a presentation the Window menu allows you to select multiple views of the document under construction and the View menu contains functions that are useful during editing when defining properties within objects in a presentation The use of each of the elements in the menus is discussed in the GRiNS Tutorials Guide NOTES 1 2 You are not required to open a project or other container file to work with the GRiNS Editor you may freely import presentations made with a text editor or with any other SMIL editor While the Editor allows you to open and edit any SMIL presentation if that SMIL presentation contain
25. o that in the Editor If you use another SMIL player such as G2 or Soja then the Player View will give you a good approximation of what you can expect A Bird s Eye View of the GRiNS Editor 23 although the actual rendering of the presentation will be determined by the facilities of the player you select The select copy cut paste model supported by GRiNS allows you to quickly duplicate basic structures in your presentation or in the GRiNS templates You can have multiple presentation open at once and copy structures between these presentations via the GRINS clipboard In all cases GRINS does most of the work in maintaining a correct and consistent SMIL presentation which you can preview in part or as a whole at any time during the editing process This is a key benefit of the GRiNS approach Another benefit of the multi view approach taken by GRINS is to isolate you from the details of the underlying presentation format In this way the GRINS Editor can produce presentations in multiple formats from a single GRiNS description and lets your presentation remain the same even as the underlying format evolves A Note on Designing Adaptive Presentations As a content author you can either create a simple presentation that assumes your users clients will be able to view all of the data objects that you send them You can also take a broader view by specifying some alternatives to either individual objects or to entire sub parts of the pre
26. o use different Layouts at different times in that presentation Layouts can be shared across documents allowing authors to create multiple presentations with the same look and feel New Layouts and Layout Channels the GRINS value added version of SMIL s Regions can be defined and maintained in the Layout view Notes 1 SMIL Regions are visual abstractions for allocating screen space Their use is optional in a presentation The definition of Layout Channels is also optional but as with SMIL they are a very useful tool in making compelling presentations 2 We use the term Layout Channel instead of a Layout Region because our Channels provide an extra measure of resource allocation and control that allow you to constrain how information is processed by the target player It allows you to prioritize the activation of resources so that if there are unexpected constraints during processing of the application you can give the player hints as to what is really important and what is incidental 3 The extra functionality provided by Layout Channels is currently only supported by the GRINS Player When playing GRiNS built presentations on other players these extra features are not available and the base presentation will default to standard SMIL properties A Bird s Eye View of the GRiNS Editor 21 The Hyperlink View Creating Order within the Chaos of Links The GRiNS Editor provides you with full control over SMIL links You can define anc
27. open windows on this document The Window gt Close closes a single view while the File gt Close closes the document and all views The player toolbar is shown when you open the player view there is no Editor toolbar The keyboard shortcuts follow standard Macintosh conventions SGI and SUN UNIX notes Each view in the Editor under UNIX has its own window Moreover each window has a private menubar The order of menus and commands within menus is the same as on Windows and Macintosh but menus and commands that have no meaning within a certain view are omitted UNIX keyboard shortcuts follow standard UNIX conventions and are listed in the menus Under Unix GRINS uses a small separate window where you can open documents and exit the editor and another small window per open document where you select which views to open save the document etc A Bird s Eye View of the GRiNS Editor 11 An Overview of the GRiNS Authoring Views This section will look at each of the views provided by the GRiNS Editor We will not show you how to create and manipulate objects within each view we leave this to the GRiNS Tutorials Guide Instead we will give an overview of how GRiNS helps you to manage the work flow during document creation and maintenance While document creation is the focus of many competing tools the GRINS Editor was designed to let you not only build but also edit tailor and refine presentations even if they weren t made with
28. ora tej Y GRINS Quick Start Guide GRINS for SMIL Editor Player Version 1 0 Windows Macintosh and UNIX O 1999 Oratrix Development bv All rights reserved GRINS for SMIL v1 0 Quick Start Guide for Windows Macintosh and UNIX August 1999 The software described in this manual is furnished under license and may be used only in accordance with the terms of that license No part of this publication may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form without the written permission of Oratrix Development bv GRINS GRINS for SMIL GRINS SMIL GRINS Editor and GRiNS Player are trademarks of Oratrix Development RealAudio RealVideo RealText RealPix RealMedia and RealSystem G2 are trademarks of RealNetworks Inc Windows Windows NT Windows 95 Windows 98 and Netshow are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation Mac Macintosh MacOS and Quicktime are trademarks of Apple Computer Corporation IRIX and O2 are trademarks of Silicon Graphics Inc Solaris and SunOS are trademarks of Sun Microsystems Inc UNIX is a registered trademark licensed through X Open Company ii GRINS for SMIL Quick Start Guide Important Notices This is the first version of the GRINS for SMIL Quick Start Guide tor Version 1 0 All of the information has been verified but incremental product updates may impact part of this guide This version of the GRINS for SMIL Quick Start Guide has been produced for use as an off line
29. ou must provide your GRiNS License Key Instructions for using this key are provided when the key is issued Installing and Running GRiNS for SMIL 3 Installing GRiNS on Windows 95 98 NT 4 0 systems To install the GRINS Player on Windows platforms execute the file GRiNS_Play exe this program executes the Player installer Follow the instructions provided by the installer program To install the GRiNS Editor for Windows execute the file GRiNSed_1 0_install exe this program will install both the GRiNS Editor and a separate GRiNS Player based on the information you give during the installation process When complete either the GRINS Player Icon or the GRiNS Editor and GRINS Player Icons will be added to your desktop The default location for starting the GRiNS Player or the GRiNS Editor from the Start Menu is c program files oratrix grins 1 0 GRiNS exe or c program files oratrix grins 1 0 GRiNSed exe NOTES 1 While Administrative privileges are NOT required to install GRINS some systems may restrict your access to shared disks or certain directories Contact your local administrator if you have problems 2 You can remove all of the GRINS Components via the Add Remove Programs program in the control panel or via the Uninstall tools provided with the distribution 3 The GRiNS components have been architected to be as unintrusive to your system as possible but care should always be taken when removing or replacing system fi
30. r simply tell GRINS what you want and GRINS does the rest Note the current version of SMIL is very restrictive in the definition of sync arc timing relationships so GRiNS will warn you if you are creating a SMIL document and inadvertently violate a SMIL restriction Another type of information in the Timeline view is the set of alternatives presented in a SMIL switch The Timeline view shows all possible combinations of elements in a switch When two alternatives exist for the same resource at the same time these are drawn as stacked items above one another The resource feedback for the GRINS Player will only highlight the choices made for the 1 While itis tempting to consider GRiNS channels to be the same as SMIL regions they do have subtle differences Channels can be used as the basis for sophisticated resource management in advanced document you can learn to use them effectively after you get the hang of creating standard SMIL files 18 GRINS for SMIL Quick Start Guide current preferences setting of a document Again for complete details consult the GRiNS documentation that is supplied when purchasing the GRINS Editor The final type of information presented in the Timeline view is a bandwidth resource meter strip located at the bottom of the display Depending on the target bandwidth you choose for example 28 8K or ISDN line speeds the graph will tell you the suggested pre roll time for you presentation and whether
31. r the listed RealMedia data types used in the RealNetworks G2 player Table 1 RealMedia l GRiNS Editor GRINS Player Extension yP Recognized Rendered Recognized Rendered RealAudio ra rm yes yes yes yes RealVideo rv rm yes yes yes yes RealText rt yes yes yes yes RealPix rp yes yes yes yes Notes 1 Recognized in the Editor means that RealMedia regions can be specified as part of a document A G2 compatible presentation can be authored Timing of RealMedia objects will not be displayed unless a RealSystem G2 player is installed 2 Recognized in the Player means that data objects containing RealMedia items will be parsed correctly and will not cause the Player to crash Access methods The GRiNS player supports the following access methods URL schemes file http ftp data gopher References and Links Please see the Links section of the GRINS Web site www oratrix nl GRiNS 30 GRINS for SMIL Quick Start Guide Where Next The GRiNS Quick Start Guide provides you with a general overview of GRiNS and a particular introduction to GRINS SMIL Once you have installed GRINS you can either set out on your own in the process of creating multimedia presentations or you can save your time and energy by following a set of simple and straight forward GRiNS SMIL tutorials These can be found in the GRINS Tutorial Guide which is available in on line HTML or off line
32. reference Images and page layout have been optimized for printing on a 600 dpi or greater laser printer For best reproducibility the use of a color printer is recommended although every effort has been made to make illustrations readable on other printers as well If you wish to use it as an on line reference via a PDF reader we recommend that you increase the level of display magnification when viewing images The images used in this publication were taken from the GRINS for SMIL 1 0 win32 0 version for Windows 95 98 NT 4 While the look of other versions of GRINS are slightly different because of adherence to common conventions on those other environments the functionality described is similar for all versions of GRINS In order to reduce document size only images from the Windows version have been included in this document We welcome your questions on GRINS for SMIL and comments on this documentation Please submit all questions and comments to our support desk at grins support oratrix com We maintain a list server dedicated to sharing experiences among GRINS for SMIL users See the on line release notes that come with the software distribution for details of this listserver Finally if you wish to submit your own SMIL files as examples for other users please send a request for submission to grins examples oratrix com Important Notices iii GRINS for SMIL Quick Start Guide Table of Contents Important Notices
33. resentation ociniimomonmmm m 14 The Timeline View Showing Resource Use During a Presentation 17 The Layout View Managing Visual and Auditory Resources u s 20 The Hyperlink View Creating Order within the Chaos of Links 22 Getting Ready to Create Documents cococeccnincncononenennnnnannnnnnnnrornnnonarananonnanass 23 The GRINS Work Flow Model ooninincoconononocicocicinonanacananonononacananonononcnananonos 23 A Note on Designing Adaptive Presentations moninininconinanonncicicinianacinnanenos 24 GRiNS Quick Reference Information sesesesssseseesscsescsossesesescssecsoeseseseeoeses 27 SMIL Compliance Information cc ccc sese cs cseeseescscsesesesescscsssnseecseeees 27 Supported Media Table ccccccccccsescsssseeseecetesesescenesesesesnesssseecenesssesnaenens 27 Support for RealMedia G2 Data Types oooccococononononncnnnenenconcncnnnanarnnnancnrnnnss 30 Table of Contents Access methods 30 References arid ik A aes icles ote eee dido 30 Where Next ii a rios 31 vi GRINS for SMIL Quick Start Guide GRINS Version 1 0 Distribution Roadmap Thank you for downloading the GRiNS for SMIL or GRINS SMIL for short toolset for playing and optionally creating SMIL presentations This publication will help you understand how GRiNS SMIL works and how it can help you to create high quality multimedia presentations for the Web easily and effectively Distribution Package Contents The
34. richer Web environment for everyone The GRINS Editor was designed to make this sort of substitution easy to create easy to maintain and easy to present to the user A Bird s Eye View of the GRiNS Editor 25 26 GRINS for SMIL Quick Start Guide GRiNS Quick Reference Information SMIL Compliance Information The GRiNS Editor for SMIL and the GRiNS Player support the entire SMIL v1 0 specification with the exception of the constructs listed below Documents that make use of these constructs are parsed correctly but the features are ignored during rendering begin and end attributes in the anchor element e fit fill and fit scroll attribute values in region element e name pics label attribute value in meta element e alt attribute in media object elements e fill attribute These features are expected to supported in a future release Supported Media Table The following chart gives a listing of the media types supported by various versions of the GRiNS Editor and Player for SMIL esi Extensions ee Mac ae ee os NT 63 2 5 audio 32kadpcm no no no no audio basic au yes yes yes yes audio x aiff aiff aifc aif yes yes yes yes audio x wav wav yes yes yes yes 1 D image cgm no no no no image g3fax no no no no GRiNS Quick Reference Information 27 Windows SGI Sun cba Extensions 95 98 Mac
35. s non generic data types you may not be able to preview data types See the Reference section of this Guide for supported formats For some types of changes like global substitutes it is often desirable to use a text editor rather than a structure editor This is possible with the GRiNS Editor simply open the SMIL file with your favorite text editor and make whatever changes are necessary You can then re open the file from within the GRiNS Editor The Editor also allows you to create and play documents with GRINS extensions called cmif files these are enhanced functionality documents that contain a super set of SMIL functionality but which can only be rendered using the GRiNS Player GRINS for SMIL Quick Start Guide A Bird s Eye View of the GRiNS Editor Once GRiNS SMIL is loaded onto your system you should open a simple SMIL presentation such those found in the Examples folder in the GRINS distribution and look at the multiple document views available under the Window pull down menu It is probably a good idea to close each GRINS window after opening it to avoid screen clutter You may of course keep multiple views open if you wish The size of your presentation and the screen size and resolution of your editing system will often determine your use of GRINS views There are several key concepts about GRINS that will help you be more productive when using the GRiNS Editor A Bird s Eye View of the GRiNS Editor GRINS
36. sentation Such alternatives can be based on presentation resources for example during peak hours on the Web it may be wise to substitute a slide show presentation for a piece of video or the choice may be based on natural language for example having both an English and Spanish versions of an audio and or set of text messages available within the same document One of the primary reasons to support alternate content is to help users who for whatever reason cannot accept one format of data such as audio for a deaf user or video for a blind user or high resolution information for a user attached to a low resolution computer by providing a more convenient type such as text instead of audio It is important to realize that this is not an us vs them issue all of us are unable to accept certain types of media at certain times depending on our work or use situations For example if you are working without headphones in a shared office space you may be unable to accept audio information even if 24 GRINS for SMIL Quick Start Guide there is nothing wrong with your hearing the circumstances simply don t allow you to disturb others around you Most SMIL Players such as the GRiNS Player and RealNetworks G2 implement SMIL s ability to control content distribution via user preferences of player interrogation of system resources If you make use of these facilities you can increase your potential audience and help create a
37. tem typically usr local grins If you have problems downloading or extracting these files please send e mail with detailed problem report to grins support oratrix com Using the GRiNS SMIL Player The GRiNS SMIL Player is a fully functional player for SMIL 1 0 documents You can download it for free for single license use from the GRiNS Web site at http www oratrix com GRiNS The GRiNS SMIL Player is appropriate for applications that do not require streaming media support or for applications that want to use datatypes not supported by the RealSystem G2 player To use GRiNS SMIL to play a standard SMIL file start the player and use the Open action in the File menu to select the SMIL presentation to play The presentation may be located on your local system or it may be referenced via a URL A syntax check is made of the presentation as it is loaded and any problems found by the Player are reported to the user Some problems are fatal while others will generate error messages or warnings The menu in the player is shown below GRINS Player Iof x File View Play Window Help gt ma The File pull down menu allows standard file operations Open and Close in the Player plus a means of setting preferences The View pull down menu in the Player allows you to view the presentation source file The Play pull down menu allows you to Start Stop and Pause the current presentation short cuts to these 6 GRINS for SMIL
38. witch are drawn as a parallel container since all of the options are available in parallel although typically only one of the alternatives will be selected by the player at run time The top to bottom ordering may seem a bit unfamiliar at first but itis exactly the way that you typically draw a sketch of the presentation by hand The Structure view contains the following types of information 1 Itshows the data object references used in the presentation these are pointers to a particular object located either in a local file or as a remote asset on the Web or in a database and its associated properties for this particular use in the presentation While data object reference is the full name in GRINS we also use the term data object when the context is clear 2 It shows what kind of structure containers are used to compose the presentation Two basic kinds of structure containers are used with SMIL the parallel container called a PAR in SMIL and the sequential container called the SEQ in SMIL Parallel and sequential structure containers can contain a nested combination of data objects or other structure containers 3 It shows a grouping of possible alternative data objects or structure containers within a SMIL Switch statement At run time one of the options within the switch will be selected based on either user preferences or system properties The Structure view gives you an overview of the candidates for presentation Each of th
39. y for that platform but all versions can edit and play presentations made by any GRINS authoring environment Obtaining GRiNS SMIL The GRiNS SMIL environment can be obtained from the GRINS Web site Depending on the software you downloaded you will have either the GRINS SMIL Player or a combination of the GRINS Player and the GRiNS SMIL Editor The Player is a a fully functional player for non streamed SMIL V1 0 documents The GRINS Editor is a visual authoring environment that is coupled to the GRINS Player you can create preview edit review and publish your presentation from within a single GRiNS framework The GRiNS Player is available for general download through the GRINS Web site http www oratrix com GRiNS Note a redistribution license is required to distribute the GRINS Player with your production The GRiNS Editor comes in various versions with a number of integrated and add on filters for creating multimedia presentations that can be presented on a variety of popular third party players The GRINS SMIL Editor is available for a free test drive see the GRINS web site ittp www oratrix com GRiNS for details Installing GRiNS The instructions for installing GRINS depend on the platform that you use This section reviews the general instructions See the release notes shipped with the GRiNS software for the latest details on installing GRINS Note 1 The first time you execute the GRINS Editor program y
40. you can fit all the information you want across the communication line you have selected Note that bandwidth modeling and rendering is resource intensive By default it is off but you can turn it on via the View menu As with the Structure view any object on the Timeline can be selected and previewed by selecting an option from the Play menu The Timeline view is selected from the Window menu and closed using standard platform dependent techniques NOTES 1 The colored blocks in the Timeline view show how the player pre fetches several components before they are needed As presentation complexity increases the player will need to do more work The Timeline view shows when the player or individual resources will be busy 2 The coloring of the blocks only occurs when the player is in Play mode When the presentation is stopped all boxes are mono color To freeze a particular display select Pause from the Play menu or the short cut bar 3 If another player is used such as the RealNetworks G2 player other player activity and scheduling can be expected The colored block view in the Timeline window will be representative but not exact unless you use an optional G2 performance prediction module for GRINS A Bird s Eye View of the GRiNS Editor 19 The Layout View Managing Visual and Auditory Resources When working with template based SMIL presentations the template creator will typically have created a number of SMIL Layout Re
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