Ambulant Player for Windows is an Open Source player for SMIL 3.0 documents. It is intended primarily for the research community, and not as a replacement for commercial SMIL players such as the RealPlayer or QuickTime: while the performance is at least on par with such players (in our not so humble opinion:-) the Ambulant Player does not provide support for the wide range of media encoding formats that such players support.

To play a SMIL document from a local file you use the File->Open command and select the file. Alternatively, methods customary on your platform will also work, such as drag and drop of the document's icon on Mac or Windows, or passing the filename on the command line on Unix.

To play a document over the network you use File->Open URL or File->Open Location and type the URL.

Mac and Windows players allow simulaneous playback of multiple documents, on Windows CE and Linux that is not supported in the current release.

In case of problems encountered during playback a dialog with a terse summary of the problem will be displayed. More information can be found in the logging window, which can be opened through View->Log or File->Log Window. The amount of detail in the log window can be selected through the preferences.

In the preferences window you can also select how audio and video are rendered, and how to access some resources over the net..

In the Preferences window (called Settings on some platforms) you can set various change the way Ambulant Player handles some functions:
1. Log Level allows you to change how verbose the log output will be. In general debug is for developers only, trace is for people creating SMIL documents and the higher levels are for all users.
2. You can select the preferred XML parser to use. Expat is fast and best for everyday use, but Xerces has the option to do some rigorous syntax checking on your document, which is good if you are creating SMIL documents. It gives you the option to check using either the DTD or the Schema for the SMIL language, the DTD is the preferred way. If you check using the schema you also have the option of doing some checking on the schema itself.
3. Strict URL parsing complains about URLs containing formally illegal characters such as spaces (which should be percent-escaped) in your document.
4. On Mac and Windows, you can select the preferred way to play back video (and, on Windows, audio): using the platform-native DirectShow/QuickTime renderers, or the platform-independent open source ffmpeg and sdl renderers. Usually, the former is more efficient, but may not support all media types.
5. For playback of media over rtsp you can select which transport protocol to use. UDP is generally better, but may not be able to get through a firewall.
6. Link selection with TAB and LF allows you to navigate with the keyboard, in addition to the mouse. TAB will advance the focus to the next active element on-screen, and newline will activate that element.
7. Enable plugins determines whether Ambulant will use its plugin architecture. Disabling this may help in tracking down problems, but some standard functionality will also be disabled (xerces parser, SMIL 3.0 state support, ffmpeg rendering on Windows). For debugging purposes it is also possible to select a non-standard plugin directory.

The license of this software is Free, you can free download and free use this media player software.