Timed-fragmentation of SVG documents to control the playback memory usage

The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) language allows in its version 1.2 the description of multimedia scenes including audio, video, vector graphics, interactivity and animations. This standard has been selected by the mobile industry as the format for vector graphics and rich media content. For this purpose, additional tools were introduced in the language to solve the problem of the playback of long-running SVG sequences on memory-constrained devices like mobile phones. However, the proposed tools are not entirely sufficient and solutions outside the scope of SVG are needed. This paper proposes a method, complementary to the SVG tools, to control the memory consumption while playing back long running SVG sequences. This method relies on the use of an auxiliary XML document to describe the timed-fragmentation of the SVG document and the storage and streaming properties of each SVG fragment. Using this method, this paper shows that some SVG documents can be stored, delivered and played as streams, and that their playback as streams brings an important memory consumption reduction while using a standard SVG 1.2 Tiny player.