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)

• 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 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…

What could it be?

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!

I can bring knowledge of components in mmvideo (such as DevVideo and the video SHAI) and a general interest in video-related technologies and use-cases to the table. Since mmvideo is towards the bottom of the Symbian’s video stack, I’m no expert on the upper layers (I have a reasonable understanding of what’s there but I’d struggle to help you debug tricky middleware or app problems) so I’d be delighted if other video package owners and experts join in!

I’m also open to expanding the scope of this BoF to multimedia if there is demand and suitable experts can attend. Let’s see what other BoFs get proposed first though.

So:

• Would you be interested in participating in a video BoF?
• Are there particular topics you’d like to discuss?
• Were you thinking of doing a similar BoF and want to join forces?

Please add your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.

* All this is assuming I can get a trip to Amsterdam for SEE2010 approved by my employer. However, if there’s a strong demand for this BoF then I should have an equally strong argument to get my trip approved, so please do let me know below if you’d like this BoF to happen!

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!

Once all the necessary build, test and delivery mechanisms are in place the work to migrate video components out of mm and into mmvideo will begin. All going well, there will eventually be a changeset in mm where the video components disappear and, at the same time, another in mmvideo where they re-appear.

The directory layout within mmvideo will be different from mm (it will be a lot tidier! ), but any exported files and binaries that get built will be identical. Therefore, users in other packages (or apps) will notice no change. We’re only moving source files from one folder to another!

This work is happening on the MCL (i.e. for Symbian^4 and beyond). Existing RCLs (everything up to and including Symbian^3) will remain unchanged, i.e. everything is inside mm and mmvideo does not exist.

I will document the old and new directory locations for each video component in due course. That way it should be easy to find what you’re looking for in any Symbian release.

If you have any questions feel free to post them as comments below!

(Photo credit: “The view from my window…” by Attila Malarik)

Video SHAI

Earlier this year I was gathering feedback from the SHAI working group on some video OpenMAX IL extensions that we at Nokia had proposed. I still need to (and will) incorporate that good feedback into the document but various other activities within Nokia have been stealing my time so I haven’t been able to do so yet.

However, in this time there has been some progress in other areas which will affect the video SHAI work going forward. In particular, the “Next Generation Multimedia Architecture” (NGMA) which was going to be a radical rewrite of the entire, low-level multimedia system in Symbian OS, has been replaced by a more evolutionary development of the multimedia systems. However, like NGMA, the new stuff will be using OpenMAX IL as the API between the OS and the various hardware adaptations.

It’s taken a while, but we do now have a pretty good story within Nokia on how we will evolve the existing video subsystem (i.e. the stuff below DevVideo) to use IL. I will try to share as much material about this as early as I can. I think this will really help focus the video SHAI discussions as there will finally be something being developed above the SHAI so that we can actually try things for real.

As you’ll see in a minute, I have a few other things to sort out first but then I hope to reboot and re-invigorate the video SHAI discussion. There should be some opportunities to get involved and contribute in this area, so watch this space!

Package split

The work to split up the mm package has finally begun within Nokia. Several teams are involved and the logistics are non-trivial, so this is unfortunately not as simple (or quick) as just moving a few directories around. Dependencies need to be satisfied, automated build and test systems need to be updated, bug tracking tools need to be informed etc. etc.

As part of this I’m working on setting up the mmvideo package which will get created as part of this split. This will be the home for the new OpenMAX goodness we’re cooking up but it will also contain some old favourites which have so far resided in mm: The DevVideo API, MMF video client utility, 3GP Library and some related bits and bobs. I’ll be publishing some details of what’s moving and where it’ll end up in the near future.

Contributions

One of the things I look forward to most as a package owner is attracting, reviewing and hopefully accepting contributions to mmvideo. I got my first taste recently, when I was asked to review a small tweak to DevVideo being offered by the good people at NTT DoCoMo. Sadly I had to reject it in this instance as it wasn’t compatible with the original design of DevVideo and therefore could have introduced problems with other people’s implementations (a copy of the discussion is archived on the mm-dev mailing list). Fortunately, NTT DoCoMo accepted my verdict and we both look forward to cooperating in the future.

I hope that many more contribution offers come in the future and that I can accept as many of them as possible. Don’t forget, it’s not just code that we’re looking for! There’s lots of other things you can contribute: Ideas, review comments, documentation, example apps, helper scripts… Even just participating in discussions on the forums or mailing lists can help.

If you already have something you’d like to contribute then please get in touch with me – the sooner we can discuss it the better. For anyone who’d like to help out but doesn’t know where to start, I will publish an mmvideo wishlist once the package goes live. In the meantime you could look at other package’s wishes or join the Symbian Bug Squad.

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)