Multimedia Integration Examples

by Doug Oard

Apollo 17, the last mission to the moon, traveled further from the Lunar Module than any other mission; the trip took over an hour at an average speed of about 10 kilometers per hour. It was not possibile to send television when the Lunar Rover was in motion, and this was the only flight in which the Lunar Rover carried no motion picture camera. The trip was therefore documented in only two ways:

• Recorded radio conversations between the two astronauts on the Moon and another astronaut in mission control in Houston.
• 140 photographs, about one every 30 seconds, taken by the astronaut that was not driving.

The Apollo Lunar Surface Journal contains digitized versions of the the audio and each of the photographs. A single photograph can be shown with the audio using a Real Audio Metadata file (.ram) as follows:

• ramdemo.ram (executable)
• ramdemo.ram (text file)

If we want to show the sequence of pictures that were taken, we can to use the Synchronized Multimedia Interaction Language (.smil) as follows:

• smildemo.smil (executable) (you may need to resize the RealVideo player to see the images)
• smildemo.smil (text file)

Here's another way of doing the same thing (sped up for demo purposes):

• smildemo.smil (executable)
• smildemo.smil (text file)

Editing large SMIL files is an error prone activity; one common approach is to write a program that generates correct SMIL code for the content that you wish to display.

Last updated: $Date: 2006/08/25 02:42:48 $