Learned NetBSD Gurus,

Please consider building a pkg for the Ambulant SMIL player. I
gave a shot at building from Linux source but it has a dependency
which won't build. I posted my problem on the Ambulant users
mailing list but none have answered usefully. The support folks
at Ambulant also have no clues for me.

I think, it would be well very well indeed to have the Ambulant
SMIL player for NetBSD pkgsrc because it supports SMIL 2.1
and none other's do. Also it supports only copyright- and
patent-free, open-source codecs, which is in BSD's best interest
generally, yes?

I have this week had occasion to start using the Ambulant
SMIL player in its Win32 version on a laptop borrowed from
work. I have been building a presentation guided only by the
SMIL 2.0 hardcover manual and everything I have tried from
the book works in the Ambulant player.

They do not very often work at all in RealPlayerGold, which
supposedly does support SMIL, certainly not the audio portion
unless it is in *.rm format. And often it just crashes. I read
where Firefox intends to support SMIL but not until 3.0. The
Ambulant player supports SMIL 2.1 today.

The Ambulant SMIL player's web page lists source for Win32, Linux
and Mac OS X. The problem I ran into was trying to build their
special ffmpeg which has a feature apparently not in the NetBSD
pkg for ffmpeg. It went like so...

baal: {48} ./configure
Error, no memalign() but SSE enabled, disable it or use --enable-memalign-hack.
baal: {49} ./configure --enable-memalign-hack
baal: {50} make
make: "/home/aplonis/ffmpeg-cvs/Makefile" line 12: Missing dependency operator
make: "/home/aplonis/ffmpeg-cvs/Makefile" line 15: Need an operator

When I posted this result to ambulant-users mailing list, one person
responded but only to apologize for having no suggestions.

Here are some links about SMIL and Ambulant

http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/
http://homepages.cwi.nl/~media/SMIL/
http://www.cwi.nl/projects/Ambulant/distPlayer.html
http://brian.sol1.net/svg/

I think one and all for the many useful pkgs on NetBSD to date and
hope that by asking for this one more, I won't seem to importunate.

Respectfully,

Gan Starling
Kalamazoo MI
USA