Product: Khronos Group Releases OpenMAX IL 1.1

The Khronos Group, a member-funded industry consortium devoted to maintaining file format standards, has announced that it has ratified and publicly released the latest version of its OpenMAX IL, a royalty-free digital media/imaging API that defines enhanced media component interfaces. According to the group, the API is designed to enable the rapid integration of media acceleration into streaming media frameworks on embedded devices. In addition, The Khronos Group also launched the OpenMAX IL 1.1 Adopter's Program, which provides access to a new set of conformance tests. Products that meet the requirements of the conformance tests may use the OpenMAX IL trademark, ensuring cross-platform audio, video, and image codec interoperability. Version 1.1 of OpenMAX IL, which was created with the assistance of Texas Instruments and the support of other Khronos member companies, adds significant functionality to OpenMAX 1.0. Among the benefits introduced with the new version are standardized components, interfaces and controls for common media functionality to make most streaming applications easier to construct and more portable; enhanced video encode and decode controls for more record and playback flexibility; enhanced camera controls including sophisticated focus control, continuous and single shot control and auto exposure control; and abstracted access to synchronous content enabling flexible media components with the ability to process content from a variety of sources. Other enhancements include extended buffer payload information such as video quantization data to enable sophisticated adaptive applications; extended color format support; creation and parsing of metadata in the media stream to enable intelligent media components and applications; enhanced resource management for more robust operation on constrained systems; and integration with EGL to enable OpenMAX to seamlessly integrate with graphic APIs such as OpenGL ES and OpenVG. “The OpenMAX standard is ambitious in its goal to offer a set of APIs for the embedded device market to enable hardware acceleration of multimedia codecs,” commeted analyst Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research. “The introduction of OpenMAX IL goes another step with a low level interface that abstracts codecs and provides portability across operating systems and software stacks. OpenMAX IL demonstrates the flexibility of the Khronos model in general, and specifically; the ability of OpenMAX to adapt to the changing demands of developers and manufacturers in the embedded device market.”