Streaming media portability with the emerging support OpenMAX

In order to create multimedia products such as smart-phones, media players, gaming consoles among others, developers need to optimize the low-level code. Currently, this code is written mostly in assembly language and must be rewritten for each different hardware platform. For this reason, the development of media infrastructure is very expensive, time consuming for integration and programming. Therefore, the media infrastructure portability is a multi-level industry problem. The application programmers need a cross-platform portable API (Application Programming Interface) for controlling high-level media operations. The system integrators need cross-vendor standard for media component integration with sophisticated data routing and robust synchronization. The software component vendors and the silicon vendors need a reliable way to accelerate diverse codecs on diverse silicon. OpenMAX helps solve this industry problem. OpenMAX was founded to meet the need to accelerate the growth of multimedia platforms and therefore the creation of final products. The end result is a standardized set of open APIs for a variety of multimedia applications. OpenMAX define a royalty-free cross-platform API that standardizes access to multimedia processing primitives used extensively in video codecs such as MPEG-4, H.264/AVC, audio and image codecs and 2D and 3D graphics. OpenMAX defines three media as an open standard, designed holistically to provide complete media infrastructure portability. The authors present a description of the OpenMAX standard and the three layers that form the structure of multimedia portability. Some implementations in the market are also presented.