Multimedia Quick Start

This document provides entry points for readers seeking to understand the technology of the Symbian platform Multimedia module and its documentation.

Symbian platform phones are typically loaded with multimedia gadgets such as cameras (for recording still and video images), radios, video and music players. The Multimedia module provides a means of accessing and controlling the hardware that drives these features.

Getting started with Multimedia

Multimedia functionality is summarized below:

Playing and Recording audio and video

You can write applications to play and record audio and video:

Audio

Video

  • Play recorded video files from a device using the Video Client video player.

  • Make video recordings files from a device using the Video Client video recorder.

  • Display subtitles artwork on a video window using the Video Subtitle CRP component.

  • Create and destroy a surface for video rendering using the Video Renderer component.

Accessing multimedia hardware

Devices may include the following hardware components:

  • Radio Tuner - for playing or recording radio broadcasts using Radio Tuner Component.

  • Camera - for capturing still and video images using Camera Framework.

  • Speech recognition - for making requests from the MMF (Multimedia Framework) to the DevASR (DevSound Automatic Speech Recognition), which are transported using the Speech Recognition Controller component.

  • Hardware abstraction layer - for video playing and recording using the Video HAI Component

Manipulating images

Many of the most common image manipulation techniques are provided:

Technologies

The following is a list of technologies used by Multimedia to enable various features:

  • Exif - to include metadata for an image, such as, a time/date stamp, a description, GPS location data, an embedded thumbnail.

  • Codecs - to deal with (playing, recording, streaming) audio and video data in one of the many supported formats through the Symbian.

  • 3GP Library - to read (parsing) and writing (composing) of various multimedia container formats.

  • FM Transmitter - to transmit the FM signal to a mobile device.

  • Metadata Utility Library - to extract metadata from audio video and image media files.

Documentation and examples

The following sections list tutorials and example applications that can be used to play and record audio and video data, perform image processing and manipulation, and access any camera and radio tuner hardware present on a mobile phone.

Tutorials

Example applications