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Developer(s) | Khronos Group |
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Website | www |
OpenMAX (Open Media Acceleration), often shortened as "OMX", is a non-proprietary and royalty-free cross-platform set of C-language programming interfaces. It provides abstractions for routines that are especially useful for processing of audio, video, and still images. [1] [2] It is intended for low power and embedded system devices (including smartphones, game consoles, digital media players, and set-top boxes) that need to efficiently process large amounts of multimedia data in predictable ways, such as video codecs, graphics libraries, and other functions for video, image, audio, voice and speech. [3]
OpenMAX provides three layers of interfaces: application layer (AL), integration layer (IL) and development layer (DL). OpenMAX is managed by the non-profit technology consortium Khronos Group. [4]
Initially announced in July 2004. [5] The OpenMAX Working Group was initially founded by members ARM, Motorola, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, and Texas Instruments. Version 1.0 of the specification was published in December 2005. [6] The last draft produced by the OpenMAX Working Group (1.2.0) dates from 2011 [7] and no product has been declared as conformant since 2012. [8] The OpenMAX specification were never updated to support recent codecs like HEVC or VP9, making Android the de facto source of updates to the OpenMAX IL standard. [9]
OpenMAX AL is the interface between multimedia applications, such as a media player, and the platform media framework. It allows companies that develop applications to easily migrate their applications to different platforms (customers) that support the OpenMAX AL application programming interface (API). [10]
OpenMAX IL is the interface between media framework, (such as StageFright or MediaCodec API on Android, DirectShow on Windows, FFmpeg or GStreamer on Linux), and a set of multimedia components (such as an audio or video codecs). It allows companies that build platforms (e.g. allowing an implementation of an MP3 player) to easily change components like MP3 decoders and Equalizer effects and buy components for their platform from different vendors. [11]
OpenMAX DL is the interface between physical hardware, such as digital signal processor (DSP) chips, CPUs, GPUs, and software, like video codecs and 3D engines. It allows companies to easily integrate new hardware that supports OpenMAX DL without reoptimizing their low level software.
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Developer(s) | Khronos Group |
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Stable release | 1.1 / January 18, 2011 |
Operating system | Cross-platform |
Type | API |
License | Various |
Website | www![]() |
OpenMAX AL accommodates common multimedia application use cases by standardizing a set of representative objects, as well as interfaces on those objects, to control and configure them. The OpenMAX AL API is divided into two profiles: Media Player and Media Player/Recorder. A platform can be compliant to one or both of these profiles by providing all features included in a profile.
It is an application-level, C-language, multimedia API designed for resource-constrained devices. The OpenMAX AL API design puts particular emphasis on ensuring the API is suitable for mobile embedded devices - including basic mobile phones, smart “feature” phones, PDAs and mobile digital music players. Nevertheless, this does not preclude its applicability to other sophisticated media playback and recording devices.
The OpenMAX AL API design devotes particular attention to application-developer friendliness. Its status as an open cross-platform API enables developers to port the same source across multiple devices with minimal effort. Thus OpenMAX AL provides a stable base for application development.
OpenMAX AL features include:
A digital television (DTV) extension specification of OpenMAX AL adds standards-agnostic mobile TV tuning, playback, recording and electronic program guide functionality to OpenMAX AL Multimedia API, as a modular royalty-free, cross-platform C-language API for high-performance digital TV-related applications on mobile and embedded devices. DTV Extension is compatible with all major mobile TV standards (e.g. DVB-H, ISDB-T, T-DMB, etc.), and supports broadcast, unicast and multicast delivery methods for Digital TV. [12] [13]
OpenSL ES (Open Sound Library for Embedded Systems) is another Khronos Group API that also provides an audio library for the same target market as OpenMAX AL, while OpenMAX target the complete multimedia services. OpenSL ES and OpenMAX AL audio subset share the same common architecture and have a few common features:
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Developer(s) | Khronos Group |
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Stable release | 1.1.2 / September 15, 2008 |
Preview release | 1.2.0 / November 7, 2011 |
Operating system | Cross-platform |
Type | API |
License | Various |
Website | www![]() |
The OpenMAX IL API strives to give media components portability across an array of platforms using the C-language. In the OpenMAX IL, components represent individual blocks of functionality. Components can be sources, sinks, codecs, filters, splitters, mixers, or any other data operator. Depending on the implementation, a component could possibly represent a piece of hardware, a software codec, another processor, or a combination thereof.
The interface abstracts the hardware and software architecture in the system. The OpenMAX IL API allows the user to load, control, connect, and unload the individual components. This flexible core architecture allows the Integration Layer to easily implement almost any media use case and mesh with existing graph-based media frameworks. The key focus of the OpenMAX IL API is portability of media components.
The OpenMAX IL API design devotes particular attention to use case flexibility and optimized data transfers between components.
The OpenMAX IL API was chosen as the base for the API to integrate Audio and Video codecs on Android, which has resulted in most SoC vendors shipping a minimal implementation that only supports the subset required by Android. Applications do not use those OpenMAX IL components directly, but only through the Android MediaCodec API. Android's subset of OpenMAX IL with its extensions is now the de facto standard.
In 2011 the provisional version 1.2.0 was released. [16]
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Developer(s) | Khronos Group |
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Stable release | 1.0.2 / December 21, 2007 |
Operating system | Cross-platform |
Type | API |
License | Various |
Website | www![]() |
The OpenMAX DL API defines a set of low-level multimedia kernels or media processing building blocks. The building blocks might be used to accelerate traditional computational hotspots within standardized media codecs and other integrated media processing engines. The functional scope of the OpenMAX DL interface spans several domains including signal processing and image processing, audio coding, image coding, and video coding.
OpenMAX DL is split into five application domains:
The OpenMAX working group was founded alongside sister project OpenVG on July 6, 2004. Promoting members in 2008 were AMD, Apple, ARM, Creative, Dell Inc, Ericsson, Freescale, Imagination Technologies Group plc, Intel, IBM, Motorola, Nokia, Nvidia Corporation, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd, SK Telecom, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc and Texas Instruments.
OpenGL is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardware-accelerated rendering.
DirectShow, codename Quartz, is a multimedia framework and API produced by Microsoft for software developers to perform various operations with media files or streams. It is the replacement for Microsoft's earlier Video for Windows technology. Based on the Microsoft Windows Component Object Model (COM) framework, DirectShow provides a common interface for media across various programming languages, and is an extensible, filter-based framework that can render or record media files on demand at the request of the user or developer. The DirectShow development tools and documentation were originally distributed as part of the DirectX SDK. Currently, they are distributed as part of the Windows SDK.
The Khronos Group, Inc. is an open, non-profit, member-driven consortium of 170 organizations developing, publishing and maintaining royalty-free interoperability standards for 3D graphics, virtual reality, augmented reality, parallel computation, vision acceleration and machine learning. The open standards and associated conformance tests enable software applications and middleware to effectively harness authoring and accelerated playback of dynamic media across a wide variety of platforms and devices. The group is based in Beaverton, Oregon.
DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) is a Microsoft API specification for the Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 platforms that allows video decoding to be hardware-accelerated. The pipeline allows certain CPU-intensive operations such as iDCT, motion compensation and deinterlacing to be offloaded to the GPU. DXVA 2.0 allows more operations, including video capturing and processing operations, to be hardware-accelerated as well.
libavcodec is a free and open-source library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data.
X-Video Motion Compensation (XvMC), is an extension of the X video extension (Xv) for the X Window System. The XvMC API allows video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process to the GPU video-hardware. In theory this process should also reduce bus bandwidth requirements. Currently, the supported portions to be offloaded by XvMC onto the GPU are motion compensation and inverse discrete cosine transform (iDCT) for MPEG-2 video. XvMC also supports offloading decoding of mo comp, iDCT, and VLD for not only MPEG-2 but also MPEG-4 ASP video on VIA Unichrome hardware.
OpenSL ES is a royalty-free, cross-platform, hardware-accelerated, C-language audio API for 2D and 3D audio. It provides access to features such as 3D positional audio and MIDI playback. It is made for developers in the mobile and gaming industry and is working toward allowing for easy porting of applications across multiple platforms.
This article describes audio APIs and components in Microsoft Windows which are now obsolete or deprecated.
Media Foundation (MF) is a COM-based multimedia framework pipeline and infrastructure platform for digital media in Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and Windows 11. It is the intended replacement for Microsoft DirectShow, Windows Media SDK, DirectX Media Objects (DMOs) and all other so-called "legacy" multimedia APIs such as Audio Compression Manager (ACM) and Video for Windows (VfW). The existing DirectShow technology is intended to be replaced by Media Foundation step-by-step, starting with a few features. For some time there will be a co-existence of Media Foundation and DirectShow. Media Foundation will not be available for previous Windows versions, including Windows XP.
Unified Video Decoder is the name given to AMD's dedicated video decoding ASIC. There are multiple versions implementing a multitude of video codecs, such as H.264 and VC-1.
PureVideo is Nvidia's hardware SIP core that performs video decoding. PureVideo is integrated into some of the Nvidia GPUs, and it supports hardware decoding of multiple video codec standards: MPEG-2, VC-1, H.264, HEVC, and AV1. PureVideo occupies a considerable amount of a GPU's die area and should not be confused with Nvidia NVENC. In addition to video decoding on chip, PureVideo offers features such as edge enhancement, noise reduction, deinterlacing, dynamic contrast enhancement and color enhancement.
Video Acceleration API (VA-API) is an open source application programming interface that allows applications such as VLC media player or GStreamer to use hardware video acceleration capabilities, usually provided by the graphics processing unit (GPU). It is implemented by the free and open-source library libva, combined with a hardware-specific driver, usually provided together with the GPU driver.
VP8 is an open and royalty-free video compression format released by On2 Technologies in 2008.
X-Video Bitstream Acceleration (XvBA), designed by AMD Graphics for its Radeon GPU and APU, is an arbitrary extension of the X video extension (Xv) for the X Window System on Linux operating-systems. XvBA API allows video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process to the GPU video-hardware. Currently, the portions designed to be offloaded by XvBA onto the GPU are currently motion compensation (MC) and inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT), and variable-length decoding (VLD) for MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP, MPEG-4 AVC (H.264), WMV3, and VC-1 encoded video.
Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) is a royalty-free application programming interface (API) as well as its implementation as free and open-source library distributed under the MIT License. VDPAU is also supported by Nvidia.
The PandaBoard was a low-power single-board computer development platform based on the Texas Instruments OMAP4430 system on a chip (SoC). The board has been available to the public at the subsidized price of US$174 since 27 October 2010. It is a community supported development platform.
Intel Quick Sync Video is Intel's brand for its dedicated video encoding and decoding hardware core. Quick Sync was introduced with the Sandy Bridge CPU microarchitecture on 9 January 2011 and has been found on the die of Intel CPUs ever since.
Distributed Codec Engine (DCE) is an API and its implementation as software library ("libdce") by Texas Instruments. The library was released under the Revised BSD License and some additional terms.
HTML5 Audio is a subject of the HTML5 specification, incorporating audio input, playback, and synthesis, as well as speech to text, in the browser.
MulticoreWare Inc is a software development company, offering products and services related to HEVC video compression, machine learning, compilers for heterogeneous computing, and software performance optimization services. MulticoreWare's customers include AMD, Microsoft, Google, Qualcomm and Telestream. MulticoreWare was founded in 2009. Today it has offices in three countries – United States, China and India.
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: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) OpenVideo Decode (OVD) API