OpenMAX AL 1.0: Smells a bit like QuickTime
A set of application-level (AL) specifications designed to simplify the creation and distribution of multimedia software — including audio, video and imaging functionality — across multiple platforms. That sounds quite a bit like Apple’s AL multimedia specification (writ large).
Khronos — no, not the Klingons — has announced the release of the OpenMAX AL 1.0 standard, a royalty-free, cross-platform C-language API for high-performance multimedia applications on mobile and embedded devices. By design, this standard is purposed to simplify deployment of hardware and software audio, video and imaging capabilities across any platform or operating system.
“The Khronos Working group for OpenMAX AL is very proud to have achieved our goal of releasing the 1.0 version of this important new specification here at Korea Games Conference, an important venue for graphics and visual technologies,” said Yeshwant Muthusamy, technology manager of Nokia and Chair of the OpenMAX AL Working Group, Khronos. “Many of the key mobile media industry companies have actively participated in making this standard as robust and inclusive as it has become, and we are very confident that the multimedia community will embrace OpenMAX AL to enable the widest range of platform-independent rich media applications.”
Functionality covered by OpenMAX AL 1.0 includes:
• Playback of audio, video, still images and MIDI
• Recording of audio and video from device’s microphone and camera
• Still image shooting including extensive controls for the camera such as exposure settings, zooming and focusing
• Extraction and insertion of content metadata
• General audio controls such as volume, rate and equalizer
• Visual controls such as brightness, contrast, gamma, resizing, mirroring and visual effects such as monochrome, emboss and negative
• Analog radio controls including RDS
• Support for LED and vibrator control
OpenMAX is a family of APIs and programming resources that fits in the broader Khronos open-source universe, which includes OpenGL, OpenCL and WebGL — all of which do or will soon play important roles in every Mac OS and iPhone OS user’s daily routines and workflows.
That said, are there any OpenCL or Grand Central optimized third-party applications available yet? I’m really looking forward to ripping and encoding DVD content, for example, with software built to take advantage of Apple’s best chops…
What’s your take?
Related Posts:
October 10th, 2009
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. It is very nice article here and I have enjoyed to read it. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often. Thanks for this nice post here.