.smil or .mms? [newbie]

.smil or .mms? [newbie] SearchSearch
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Anonymous
Posted on Friday, August 01, 2003 - 06:09 pm:   

Hi

I'm a newbie and confused about the difference between .mms files and .smil.

For argument's sake, if I had a smil file that I wanted to host on a plain web server (without all the fancy stuff that NowMMS does), could I just not store it as that - a .smil file with the relavant attachments? Or does it have to be compiled & stored as a .mms files?

Thx
Balazs
Posted on Friday, August 01, 2003 - 07:14 pm:   

Hi,

.smil is used to format the apperrance of the mms message.
Look here: http://www.realnetworks.com/resources/howto/smil/smilbasics.html

.mms is the message itself. If you view the created .mms file you could see the content of the .smil in it. All those other Matrix codes :-) are the base64(?) encoded objects - pictures, text, midi, etc. - that you included, when created the MMS message.

Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support
Posted on Sunday, August 03, 2003 - 10:50 pm:   

Hi,

Just to expand on Balazs' reply a bit ...

An MMS message is a multipart message file. It contains your SMIL file, along with any objects that are referenced in your SMIL presentation. (The way that SMIL is used within an MMS message, it cannot reference any external objects ... any objects referenced by the SMIL must be encapsulated in the same MMS message file.)

An MMS message file is a binary file format. It starts with an MMS header formatted according to the MMS Encapsulation Specification (available at http://www.openmobilealliance.org), and the content of the MMS message is a multipart message encoded, where each part is one of your objects (or the SMIL file itself). The multipart message is encapsulated according to the binary multipart message encoding format that is defined in the WAP Wireless Session Protocol (WSP) specification.

Can you put a compiled MMS file on your own web server? Yes ... but in order for the phone to receive it, you need to generate an MMS notification message to the phone that tells the phone to retrieve the message.

These two links explain how to create a binary MMS message file using the MMSCOMP utility included in the Now SMS/MMS Gateway. And they also explain how to use NowSMS to generate an MMS notification for an MMS message that is stored on an external web server.

http://www.nowsms.com/documentation/ProductDocumentation/mms_notifications_and_c ontent/Creating_MMS_Message_Files.htm

http://www.nowsms.com/documentation/ProductDocumentation/mms_notifications_and_c ontent/Sending.htm

-bn