5.1. Time Formats
Prev | Chapter 5. Understanding Time in Kino | Next

## 5.1. Time Formats

SMIL, and therefore Kino, can accept time values or display time in a variety of formats. The user interface ( Chapter 3, User Interface ) provides an option menu near the bottom of the window that affects the time format used everywhere except in the saved movie XML file. The SMIL movie file always uses the clock ( the section called “Clock” ) format.

| Note

Legacy Kino XML movie files stored time values in frame count with no unit suffix or other unit specifier. SMIL does not support frame count as a valid time format for good reason. In SMIL, numeric time values with no unit suffix default to seconds! When Kino reads an XML movie file, it uses a special "signature" to determine if it is a proper SMIL or legacy Kino XML movie file and do the "right thing," and load it correctly. However, when you save the movie, it will update the movie file to the SMIL-compliant format.

### Frames

A simple zero-based frame counter. The actual time depends upon the frame-rate of the video file.

### SMPTE time code

The SMPTE time code format comes from the SMPTE standards organisation. The format is HH:MM:SS:FF, where HH is hours, MM is minutes, SS is seconds, and FF is frames. Kino uses semicolon (;) instead of colon (:) as the last separator to indicate the use of dropframe timecode ( Section 2.6, “Drop Frame” ).

| Tip
SMIL supports a SMPTE time value in an XML file when the string "smpte=" precedes the time code.

### Clock

This formats comes from the W3C SMIL standard. It is very similar to SMPTE time code ( the section called “SMPTE time code” ) except it is a "pure" time format meaning it contains no mention of frames, which is dependent upon the frame rate of the video source. The format is H:MM:SS.MS, where H is hours, MM is minutes, SS is seconds, and MS is milliseconds. If there are less than three digits of milliseconds, then the number is padded with zeros.

| Tip
Kino developers recommend this format. This is the format Kino uses when the movie is saved to SMIL.

### Milliseconds

A simple milliseconds-based time counter. The first frame is at zero milliseconds. The number contains the suffix "ms" to inidcate the time unit. This is a SMIL time format.

### Seconds

This is a SMIL time format SS.FFF, where SS is seconds and FFF is a fraction of a second, which is always three digits and therefore milliseconds. Note, the lack of suffix because in SMIL the default time unit is seconds.

### Minutes

This is a SMIL time format MM.FFFFmin, where MM is the number of minutes and FFFF is a fraction of a minute. While SMIL does not specify a required precision, Kino always formats this time with 4 digits of precision.

### Hours

This is a SMIL time format HH.FFFFFh, where HH is the number of hours and FFFFF is a fraction of an hour. While SMIL does not specify a required precision, Kino always formats this time with 5 digits of precision. Obviously, this is probably not a very useful format, but it was added for completeness.

Prev | Up | Next
Chapter 5. Understanding Time in Kino | Home | 5.2. Time Entry