Dividable Dynamic Timeline-based Authoring for SMIL2.0 Presentations

Timeline-based editing provides users an intuitive and friendly way for multimedia authoring, but the schedule-based and deterministic property of timeline results in the lack of the ability for supporting non-deterministic temporal behavior, which is one of the key features of SMIL2.0. This paper presents the effort of supporting non-deterministic temporal behavior by timeline-based editing. The concept of Dividable Dynamic Timeline (DDTL) is proposed in the paper, which includes two novel features: dividable timeline and dynamic section. With DDTL, authors can create interactive multimedia presentations while enjoying the convenience of timeline. Mechanisms of converting from DDTL editing results to SMIL2.0 are also presented in the paper.