MMS To Email SMIL Autogeneration

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Author Message
tomh
Unregistered guest
Posted on Wednesday, June 09, 2004 - 12:51 pm:   

Hello,

I have a query regarding the Email to MMS functionality. I have sucessfully managed to get this working both attaching plain files as well as files and smil. Now its a bit of a pain to have to generate smil for every email to mms message you submit. I was wondering whether it would be possible to auto generate some basic smil for an incoming email to MMS message for the attached files and attach this smil to the outbound MMS message for proper display on a handset. i.e if you send an email in addressed to <msisdn>@<domain> with a text and image attachment, could the smil be automatically generated for this content?

Is this possible and has it been considered before?

Regards,

Tom
Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support
Board Administrator
Username: Bryce

Post Number: 2788
Registered: 10-2002
Posted on Thursday, June 10, 2004 - 05:41 pm:   

Hi Tom,

Are you having problems with a particular phone that requires SMIL?

Our thinking has been that it is better to let the phone use its default presentation behaviour rather than us tweaking some generic SMIL.

I think we could be convinced to add a configurable template so that you could insert/edit it if you want.

But thinking about it, I'm not sure exactly what such a template format should be.

We'd probably need to break the template into separate sections:

HEADER
PAGEHEADER
IMAGEREF
AUDIOREF
TEXTREF
PAGEFOOTER
FOOTER

I'd appreciate any thoughts you have on how this process would work.

-bn
tomh
Unregistered guest
Posted on Monday, June 14, 2004 - 04:42 pm:   

Hi Bryce,

I Agree that for normal MM1 situations that the SMIL handling is left to the handsets. I assume though that when content apdaption occurs that it is necessary to change the SMIL, for example if you adapted a Video to an animated gif with sound the SMIL would need to be changed accordingly. I am unsure as to how the content adaption occurs in the nowsms software and I assume that it is fairly basic as there are no profiles for specific handsets?

My original concern was not with a specific handset but with all handsets when you send inbound MM3 to MM1. When you compose the email you would attach your content e.g. picture/sound etc and send the email to msisdn@domain, this would then be sent on via MM1 to the destination handset. When it arrives at the handset though it would not have any SMIL attached and so most handsets will just display a blank MMS message with file attachements. This is not ideal as a user experience and so the idea of auto generating some basic SMIL for presentation.

If the now mmsc could look at the attachements on the inbound MM3 message and perhaps create some basic SMIL by creating a seperate page for each attachement and attach it to the outbound MM1 message.

I like the idea of having the configurable templates with the seperate sections as you suggest. I know though experience however that the way the handsets deal with SMIL varies hugely as i'm sure you do! But I think that this template method could go some way towards addressing this issue. I am still trying to investigate whether there is a generic SMIL layout that will suit most handsets.

Perhaps this can be done by having a generic header, plus a generic layout that is created for each media type, audio/image/text/video and seperate <par> tags for each peice of content

One final Question, Do you have plans in your roadmap to increase the functionality of the content apdaptation aspect of your software?

Kind regards

Tom
Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support
Board Administrator
Username: Bryce

Post Number: 2832
Registered: 10-2002
Posted on Tuesday, June 15, 2004 - 09:08 pm:   

Tom,

I would think that attempting to convert a video to an animated GIF would be futile ... so much information would be lost in the process. But yes, if some content adaptation is performed, then SMIL must be modified.

We've considered having an option for automatically generating some SMIL in the past for this type of scenario ... but to date, there's only one advantage that I could see for doing this, and that is that an audio file could be set to automatically play.

Other than that, there hasn't seemed to be much advantage.

Although, I guess there is one other issue. The SonyEricsson P800/P900 have a rather confusing UI for displaying MMS messages that don't have any SMIL. As I think of it, that is reason enough for us to implement this type of functionality.

As I look at this more, I think the hangup on our end with this is more related to the difficulty of defining a template for this. A hard coded, fixed template would be easier to implement.

I'm going to see if we can look into this a little more, as without SMIL, the presentation is quite awkward on the P800/P900.

Regarding increased content adaptation functionality, our plans here are to allow hooks into other pieces of software. The idea being that when we see a particular content type, we would issue a callback to the other software component, giving it the content type, and a link to the UAProf for the device. I'm not sure when we'll get that implemented though, as it really depends on someone having some software that is ideal for this purpose and them wanting to find a way to get it integrated.

-bn
tomh
Unregistered guest
Posted on Wednesday, June 16, 2004 - 04:30 pm:   

Bryce,

Thanks for your thourough response. I agree with you that the way the SE P800/900 deals with messages without SMIL is far from perfect. Well basically no presentation at all.

I also agree that while a template based system would be more useful in terms of tweaking a hard coded solution for your software would be a lot easier to implement.

With regards to converting video's to animated gifs w/sound this is surely one of the goals of the operators as they will have a lot of handsets that don't support video in the market place but that will be sent video content via MMS, it is then important that this content is adapated to the end users non video capable handset.

I would be interested to hear if you solve this SMIL issue!

Regards,

Tom
Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support
Board Administrator
Username: Bryce

Post Number: 2850
Registered: 10-2002
Posted on Wednesday, June 16, 2004 - 07:28 pm:   

Tom,

I've got the auto-SMIL generation on our short term enhancements list. I'd estimate probably a week or two, and we'll have something that is at least beta ready. (It'll likely be hardcoded, but we'll see.)

Regarding video to animated GIF conversion, I understand the goal ... but the loss of information is so severe I think it would be better off to replace the video with text indicating that the video could not be supported on the handset.

Ultimately, this is why I think the future is in external conversion utilities. We just have to design a good interface for hooking them in.

-bn
Tom
Unregistered guest
Posted on Wednesday, July 14, 2004 - 04:42 pm:   

Hi Bryce,

Any news on this yet?

Regards,

Tom
Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support
Board Administrator
Username: Bryce

Post Number: 3046
Registered: 10-2002
Posted on Wednesday, July 14, 2004 - 07:00 pm:   

Hi Tom,

Yes, we started doing the automatic SMIL generation for messages received on the e-mail interface. I just didn't posting any follow-up about it.

There is an update referenced in the following thread, and that update includes this:

http://support.nowsms.com/discus/messages/485/5323.html

Basically it is enabled by default. To disable automatic SMIL generating, add EMailAutoSmil=No under the [MMSC] section header in MMSC.INI.

-bn