Rob Lanphier from RealNetworks writes with news that they have released their implementation of the W3C's Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language as open source.

He writes: "RealNetworks just released the source code to their SMIL 2.0 implementation (along with JPEG, GIF, PNG, and WBMP implementations) as part of the Helix Community initiative, under the OSI-approved RPSL. Some neat tricks to do with the code: superimpose images on top of video, or transition effects between videos, using standard W3C-defined markup. More tech details in the Helix community datatype project page, or look at the SMIL production topics page. A precompiled release with this code will be coming out very soon."

This news seems like a great shot in the arm for open source multimedia. We can only hope that SVG might get the same kind of support sometime soon.