The N8 is a powerful combination of internet, video, photos, music, maps with Symbian^3 operating system. With a large capacitive touch screen supporting pinch to zoom, social networking integration, a Carl Zeiss 12 megapixel camera with wide-angle lens and Xenon flash, shooting 720p HD video, On Demand WebTV, HDMI connectivity and USB OTG, you can create, discover and share a world of creativity. Additionally, for the software developers, the device includes Qt 4.6.2, Java MIDP 2.1 and Flash Lite 4.0.

Available late summer 2010, the Nokia N8 should be the first device using the long awaited Symbian^3 operating system. I said “should” because there’re some rumors out there about a Symbian ^3 device to be released soon somewhere in Asia. Can’t wait to finally see AIR mobile running on a Symbian device… maybe we’ll be lucky with the N8?

Adobe recently announced the public availability of the Adobe AIR for Android Developer Prerelease program. Any designer or developer interested in building Android applications using the Flash Platform is welcome to join this program to get access to the beta SDK.

At Google I/O Vic Gundotra, Google VP Engineering announced Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2.5 running on FroYo.  The launch represents a milestone that we’ve been working towards for some time, and all of us at Adobe are hugely excited to see Flash Player 10.1 finally get into the hands of consumers. [more from Mark...]

Even if those announcements are all about Android OS the final target mobile operating systems for Flash Player also include Windows Phone 7, webOS, Symbian, and BlackBerry. This is a really exciting news for all Flash Mobile developers out there!

If you don’t have an Android device yet, you can already begin using this technology for your latest cool mobile project! Greg Wilson has an useful post about what you’ll need to start developing Android AIR apps today.

An interesting Flash Lite-related webinar is scheduled by Forum Nokia this month: Building Video Apps with Nokia Web Runtime & Flash Lite.

In this webinar, Robert Burdick of Forum Nokia and Kirk Ballou of Flash Widgets LLC will show you how to build great video and multimedia based applications on Nokia smartphones with Nokia Web Runtime and Adobe Flash Lite. Starting with an overview of video format and codecs supported by the devices, you will quickly know which devices to target your applications to. Next, you’ll learn the basics of doing video playback in Flash Lite via streaming or progressive download. Then you’ll see how easy it is to combine your web programming skills with Flash Lite’s multimedia capabilities to create great rich mobile Internet multimedia applications. You’ll also see some great examples of polished, commercial applications that bring the mobile experience to life with video!

Building Video Apps with Nokia Web Runtime & Flash Lite EMEA
27 May: 2 p.m. London | 4 p.m. Helsinki

Building Video Apps with Nokia Web Runtime & Flash Lite AMERICAS
27 May: 11 a.m. San Francisco | 2 p.m. New York

Forum Nokia just released and useful AIR tool for mobile prototyping: Flowella.

Flowella is an easy to use tool that enables designers and developers to create design prototypes — without writing a line of code. Prototypes are built using images of screen mock-ups and defining links between the screens. This information is then used to create an Adobe Flash Lite 3.0 application or Web Runtime (WRT) widget. These applications can then be run on one of over seventy Nokia devices or in a simulator supplied with Flowella, enabling the application interaction to be assessed.

Janus Symbian Engine, the custom made extension that will help you improve Flash Lite functionalities, has become an open source project! You can simply head to the official page here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/janussymbianeng/

Janus Symbian Engine, the custom made extension that will help you improve Flash Lite functionalities, has become an open source project! You can simply head to the official page here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/janussymbianeng/

Download it, contribute to its development and use it with Janus Symbian to expand the boundaries of Flash Lite! Of course now Janus Symbian Full and Lite have become just Janus Symbian, and it’s free to use even for commercial projects. You can find Janus Symbian in both the Janus trial package (downloadable from the website) and the registered version (available only to customers as a private download).

Related Link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/janussymbianeng/

The aim of this document is to provide a very basic introduction to the Video Streaming in Nokia devices, for a deeper discussion please refer to the Forum Nokia Audio Video section that contains a lot of information on which this document is based http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/resources/technologies/audiovideo/index…..
In a mobile device you can use the pre-installed video player for two different purposes:

- Video streaming
- Stand alone local video player

The main difference between these two is that in video streaming, the compressed video data is fetched from a server during playback, whereas in the local video viewer, the video is stored locally in the memory of the device or in the memory card.

A video in streaming is often launched through the web browser or through a downloaded definition file (.RAM file), which will launch the device streaming player and open the video URL (rtsp://address/folder/).
Downloading a file first and playing it afterwards is always local playback, because the entire video file has already been stored locally. Progressive downloading means that the entire video clip doesn’t have to be downloaded to start playing it.

In order to create a video clip you have to consider these basic building blocks

When you work on video for mobile devices the compression of the file plays a very important role so you have to consider very deeply the video coding.

Keep always in your mind that a video sequence consists of a series of still images and that video compression methods are based on reducing the redundant and perceptually irrelevant parts of video sequences.
Efficient compression cannot be reached simply by reducing the redundancy of the sequence, this is the reason why video encoders must also discard some non redundant information. When doing this, the encoders take into account the properties of the human visual system and mainly discard the information that is least important for the subjective quality of the image.

In video coding some images sequences can be harder to compress due to movement or texture that have to be rendered, in order to meet a constant bit-rate target, the video encoder controls the frame rate as well as the quality of images.

Codecs

H.263 is a codec used in various multimedia services and it provides a lot of encoding tools and coding complexities for different purposes.
For the wide part of mobile multimedia services the H.263 Profile 0, Level 10 has been defined as a mandatory codec and it’s also the mainstream codec supported in Nokia video players.

MPEG-4 Visual is an optional video codec in several recent multimedia standards and it is widely supported in more recent Nokia devices this codec, also called MPEG-4 Part 2, contains different profiles for different purposes. Nokia platforms support Simple Profile 0.

RealVideo 7 and RealVideo 8 are two proprietary video coding formats developed by Real Networks, the RealPlayer installed on Nokia devices supports the decoding of video in RealVideo 7 and RealVideo 8 formats.
RealVideo 7 is similar to MPEG-4 and H.263 , RealVideo 8 is also similar to the MPEG-4 and H.263 but it is 30% to 40% better than RealVideo 7 due to major differences in the specific techniques used for transform coding.

RealVideo 10 includes enhancements on the encoder side, so it is compatible with all RealVideo 9 capable players. RealNetworks states that RealVideo 10 provides at least the same visual quality as RealVideo 9, using a 30 percent lower bit rate.

File Formats

There is a difference between the video coding format and the video file format. The coding format is related to the action of a specific coding algorithm that codes content information into a code stream. The file format is a way of organizing video and audio code streams so that they can be accessed for local decoding and playback or streamed over a transport channel.
The following list includes some of the most common video file formats today:
Microsoft Audio-Video Interleaved (AVI)Apple QuickTime file format (.mov)MPEG-1 file format (.mpg)3GPP file format (.3gp)3GPP file format (.3gp)MP4 file format (.mp4)

Nokia Platforms

The different Nokia platforms provide different (but often similar) capabilities for the video.

Use this table as a basic reference, you find more info on Forum Nokia.

Streaming

Streaming is the transmission of real-time data, both audio and video, from a server to a client, where the client decodes and plays the data as it is received. Streaming lets the viewer see the content immediately after a short buffering period. One advantage compared to local playback is that no data will be stored permanently to the terminating client. The end user cannot forward or send the content to another user, so the content can be charged each time it is consumed. This is one great advantage for service providers.
If the content is to be served within a particular operator’s service domain only, appropriate authoring guidelines are usually available from the operator or the service provider.

Server products

There are several products that you can use in order to deliver your video on mobile devices: Open Streaming Server is an digital media delivery. Main characteristics are: – Streaming of mp4, 3gp, WMF, QT files – Dynamic Bandwidth adaptation – Load balancing – Content distribution Technology: C++, Java and CORBA http://sourceforge.net/projects/openstreamingQuickTime Streaming Server is Apple’s industrial-strength, standards-based streaming server for delivering media in real time over IP networks. Using the open standard RTP/RTSP streaming protocol, QuickTime Streaming Server provides native streaming of MPEG-4 and 3GPP files http://www.apple.com/quicktime/streamingserver/Helix Server is the only multi-format, cross platform streaming server for delivering the highest quality experience to wired and wireless devices http://www.realnetworks.com/products/media_delivery.html

Terms and meanings

Use this table as a quick reference for the most common terms used in the video streaming on mobile devices

This is a short video from the Flash Lite and C++ integration preso in Chicago.

There are at least two valid reasons for embedding a Flash Player instance into a native c++ application: the possibility of having two or more instances of the player running at the same time and the presence of our personalized icon in the system task manager.

To achieve this our application have to handle an instance of the player using CDocumentHandler class and in particular OpenFileEmbeddedL mehotd:

Embedded launching means that the UI of an application, which is responsible for handling given data type, is embedded into the parent application. There will be only parent applications icon shown in the fast swap window when an application is embedded.

The only thing we must remember is that our native application have to handle exit event from the embedded player.

So, basically, our view have to be defined as an Observer for such type of event by implementing MAknServerAppExitObserver interface and by defining HandleServerAppExit method:

To launch our document handler we must do something like this:

By this way the default player for the specified mime type is embedded in our application view… pretty cool! If we want to call a specific player we must define the specific UID in our TDataType object (please refer to the SDK documentation for any doubt).

I’ve compiled and tested the code for Symbian 9.x, but it can be used also for previous symbian versions. I hope this can be helpful. All comments, suggestions and corrections are appreciated.

THE CODE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.

This micro guide is the first of a colection dedicated to c++ dvelopers that want to prodcuce a more robust code.
These suggestions are only a quick guide based on our experience as mobile developers.

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