SMIL is the W3C XML format for Synchronized Multimedia Integration 
Language which is a standard and should, in time trounce Flash and MPEG4 
if only because it is open and royalty free. Beyond that it will 
hopefully spell doom to Microsoft Power Point as SMIL is omni-platform. 
So there is good all around, yes ;-)

The SMIL format is presented at this URL:

http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/

And there is some more info on SMIL at this URL:

http://homepages.cwi.nl/~media/SMIL/

Alas, I have yet to find any reliable way to play *.smil files on 
NetBSD. There is an open source SMIL player called Ambulant which is 
advertised to run on Linux and Mac OS X and has source code available at 
this URL:

http://www.cwi.nl/projects/Ambulant/distPlayer.html

I tried to build it but ran into some snags which are over my head since 
I am a pkgsrc addict and almost never build anything outside of pkgsrc.

I am hoping that this is the proper forum in which to suggest that the 
Ambulant SMIL player be ported into NetBSD pkgsrc. If not, please reply 
so as to inform me where to make such a proposal.

Respectfully,

Gan Uesli Starling
Kalamazoo MI USA