2

In one service I have developed, I am sending a MMS message to the user which consists of 6 images in a static order. To sort the images correctly and add formatting, I have used SMIL, which has worked well on a range of devices.

However, it seems that the iPhone is not recognizing SMIL at all. Images are ordered by file name alphabetically, and what is worse - they are not displayed as a single MMS message - but as 7 messages: title, and one message for one image.

Here is my SMIL:

<smil>
<head>
<layout>
    <root-layout  width="320" height="360" background-color="#FFFFFF" />
    <region id="logo" width="100" height="18" left="0" top="0" background-color="#FFFFFF"/>
    <region id="Text" width="320" height="342" left="0" top="25" background-color="#FFFFFF" />
    <region id="Intro" background-color="#FFFFFF"  fit="meet" left="38.5px" top="auto" />
    <region id="Image2" background-color="#FFFFFF" fit="meet" left="38.5px" top="auto"/>
    <region id="Image3" background-color="#FFFFFF" fit="meet" left="38.5px" top="auto"/>
</layout></head>
<body>
<par dur="6s">
<img src="Resized/intro1_250x360.jpg" region="Intro" />
</par>      
<par dur="6s">
<img src="image2.jpg" region="Image2" />
</par>   
<par dur="10s">
<img src="image3.jpg" region="Text" />
</par>
<par dur="10s">
<img src="image4.jpg" region="Text" />
</par>
<par dur="6s">
<img src="image5.jpg" region="Image3" />
</par>         
<par dur="10s">
<img src="image6.jpg" region="Text" />
</par>
    </body>
</smil>

Has anybody had any success with SMIL MMS messages on iPhone? Thanks

Paul Sweatte
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Valerii Shypunov
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2 Answers2

4

The Apple iPhone engineering team are not true believers when it come to MMS. So when they implemented there version of an MMSClient for the iPhone they omitted SMIL support. They seem to have just ignored that part of the 3GPP standards. Given that QuickTime up to Snow Leopard supported SMIL it's not like they didn't have the technology.

Apple is a great engineering company but has completely crippled MMS. At WWDC I asked one of the iPhone Engineers why MMS was not standards compliant he said "MMS was only included to satisfy sending photos to and from other handsets - that works so we have met the objective". When I pointed out that they were not standards compliant because they didn't support SMIL he responded with "users have much better facilities on the iPhone to handle multi media".

So there you have it. SMIL won't work. Apple don't care.

John
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0

Use XHTML or HTML5 with the Timesheets Engine or timesheets.js to emulate SMIL. Separate the images into a HTML5 page which links to the SMIL timesheet. Get it working on the desktop Safari, save it as a web archive, then send it as a MMS attachment which the user can open in mobile Safari.

References

Paul Sweatte
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