So long and thanks for all the fish!
I will soon be handing over ownership of the mmvideo package to one of my colleagues as I am transferring to a different department within Nokia. I’ve had a great time and would like to thank the Symbian Foundation and their community for all their support.
Given that the Symbian Foundation has been wound down into a licensing body, it is currently unclear how exactly open-source platform development on Symbian will continue. Nokia should be announcing some details regarding this on their new Symbian website in due course.
Hopefully they will continue with some form of open development. Assuming that’s the case this blog will live on as my successor and his fellow multimedia package owners will have plenty to write about. So, don’t remove this blog from your feed reader just yet! 
In any case, I won’t be posting here any more. If you like, you can follow my future escapades on Twitter though.
Good bye!
(Photo credit: “jumping jumping” by LoFi Photography)
Multimedia BoF at SEE 2010
Are you…
- a keen user of multimedia functionality (music, video, camera, etc.) on your phone?
- an app developer using or planning to use multimedia features?
- a platform developer working on multimedia components in the OS?
- a supplier of multimedia codecs or HW adaptation code?
- a provider of multimedia services targeting phones?
- just generally interested in multimedia on phones?
If the answer to any of those questions was “yes” and you’re attending SEE 2010 next week in Amsterdam, then you should come on down and join the Multimedia Birds of a Feather session!
It’s on Tuesday 9. November (Day 1), 15:20 – 16:30 in the “Derkinderen Kamer” room on the 1st floor. I’ll bring some snacks so you just need to bring yourselves! 
Symbian phones today have lots of megapixels, HD video, surround sound etc., so what’s next? 3D? Better integration with home entertainment systems? More powerful creativity tools like image and video editors? This is an opportunity for you to share your views on where mobile multimedia is going and what the Symbian platform should do to enable the best possible user and developer experiences in this area.
Ideally, the outcome will be some awesome ideas that can be fed back to platform developers to help them improve the Symbian platform. As a package owner working at Nokia, I will certainly be sharing relevant ideas and suggestions with my team and other fellow package owners here. If we have representatives from other companies doing platform development I would encourage them to do the same.
On a related note, if you’d like to discuss multimedia-related contributions or collaboration opportunities then please get in touch with me ( james [dot] nash [at] nokia [dot] com ) and we can set up a meeting at SEE. I’ll be there on both days.
It’s alive!
Ladies & gentlemen it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you: The Multimedia Video Package!
It’s taken a while, but it is finally (a)live! Hurrah!
At the moment all you’ll find in the package is a selection of OpenMAX IL components. These are there in preparation for our new SHAI-based architecture that is being cooked up here in Nokia as we speak. I will elaborate more on that in due course.
You may notice that the summary on our shiny new landing page refers to some other components (DevVideo, 3GP Library and MMF Video Client Utility) being in the package:
The Multimedia Video package (mmvideo) primarily provides the frameworks to integrate video encoders & decoders as well as the APIs to access their functionality. It also contains some associated components and utilities such as the 3GP library and MMF video client utility.
Fear not though, these and many more will be appearing very soon!
We decided to break up the introduction of mmvideo into two parts. The first is what has just happened, i.e. the initial introduction of the package with a few new components. The second part is to bring across the existing video components from the mm package.
Work for the second part is making very good progress. In fact, it’s almost done here within Nokia. We just need to work our way through all the testing and releasing processes.
Watch this space…
Who’s up for a video BoF?
Lars Kurth has just announced that there will be Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions at SEE 2010. I co-hosted a Multimedia BoF at last year’s SEE and found it quite interesting and useful. I’m therefore keen to do another one this year* and since my mmvideo package is finally becoming a reality, hosting a BoF around the topic of video seems appropriate! Read more…
mmvideo under construction
Hello, just wanted to let you know that the setup of the mmvideo package is coming along nicely! We’ve now got an (empty) Mercurial repo and the beginnings of some wiki pages. There still work to do in order to get the corresponding infrastructure setup here inside of Nokia but that’s moving along too. I’ll keep you posted on the progress! Read more…
Signs of life
Hello world! It’s James here, your friendly package-owner-to-be. A blog post by me is long overdue and I wanted to give you all a brief update on what’s been going on in Nokia-Symbian-video land… Read more…
A new beginning
Hello and welcome to the new and improved Symbian Multimedia Blog!
This blog replaces the previous one at http://martinpwebb.wordpress.com/. The old blog and all its posts will remain online so as not to break any existing links or bookmarks, however no new content will be posted there. Instead new posts will be appearing on this blog from now on. We therefore suggest updating your bookmarks and feed subscriptions accordingly.
As the URL suggests, the previous blog started life as a place for myself (the Symbian Foundation’s Multimedia technology manager) to blog on the topic of multimedia. However, over time new authors such as Jeremy and James joined and it transformed into a more general Symbian Multimedia blog. In order to avoid future confusion and improve visibility of this blog we decided to relocate to a more descriptive URL and that is how this new blog came to be!
We hope you enjoy our future posts and look forward to reading your comments!
(Photo credit: “A New Beginning” by Sherman)
James Nash
martinpwebb
