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S60 3rd Edition C++ SDK now with RealPlayer included

Application development - January 24th, 2006 - Written by Jukka Eklund

The final SDK for developing C++ applications for S60 3rd Edition was published last week, as you may have already noticed. I just wanted to highlight a first-ever feature on the SDK: the platform video player is now part of the SDK. You will see it on the emulator grid like it is on the phone. I think this is a great addition, now you can try out video content on the emulator without the need for actual phone (though there are some exceptions that I’ll explain later).

This also brings possiblity to watch streaming video in the emulator. There are however some issues with streaming through firewalls. If you are behind a firewall, it might be that the RTSP stream won’t come through. You will need to either configure the firewall to route the traffic to your emulator, or try to use the emulator on a computer that is not behind a firewall. In a corporate environment this might prove to be quite difficult. When I was testing the SDK, I did it at home where I can have full control on the firewall.

As mentioned on the SDK release notes RealPlayer might have difficulties playing out some audio streams. Also it’s worth noticing that some of the video or audio codecs found on S60 3.0 based devices are not available on the SDK. MPEG-4 AVC found on Nokia N80&N92 is one such codec. So, the emulator RealPlayer doesn’t fully eliminate the need for the actual phone in all cases. In your opinion, how important an addition this is to the SDK and what do you think about the limitations?

You can get the SDK from Forum Nokia.

About the author Jukka Eklund

I have been working in the Finnish IT industry for over 10 years, and spend most of that time working with a some form of Internet service. [..]

Comments(21)

  1. Steve Litchfield wrote

    Welcome! As you probably realise my now, I’m a bit of a Symbian multimedia buff - looking forward to reading your blog!

    Steve Litchfield

  2. Alexandre Silva wrote

    Hello.
    I’d like to know one thing:
    Why it is not possible to make the real player to run in full screen by default? I always have to pause the video and then go to options and continue in full screen… Is it so hard to code? Thanks

  3. Marco Casario wrote

    hi Jukka,
    one other great feature of SDK for S60 3rd Edition is also the FlashLite view emulator !

  4. Jukka Eklund wrote

    Alexandre: I agree with you. This will most probably change at some point, when video viewing in landscape mode becomes an expected feature. Actually at least in Nokia N80 it goes to full screen by default.

  5. Alexandre Silva wrote

    Ok. It’s nice to know that as I want to buy Nokia N80 when I see it in a store.

  6. Teemu Uusikartano wrote

    Alexandre,

    You should be able to use number 2 key to toggle full screen mode whilst playing a video. This works at least on my N70’s Real Player.

  7. Alexandre Silva wrote

    I know that thanks, but it’s not as practical as beeing as default…

  8. Jukka Eklund wrote

    I think it should be a user selectable option, on which mode to start by default. That’s how it is on Windows Mobile.

  9. AkBoom wrote

    I have never got an rtsp 3GP link streaming except some .rm examples from the real site. Do operators block rtsp/udp ports?

    Boom

  10. Lilja wrote

    I use my Real Player every day and I’ve noticed that it makes my phone crash every now and then. The player jams and I’m always forced to reboot the whole device in order to solve the problem. I’m using a N6630.

  11. Jukka Eklund wrote

    Boom: are you using the emulator or phone? Some operators might block traffic, for example some links work only with a correct SIM card.

    Lilja: sounds like your phone could use a software upgrade done on your nearest Nokia service point. It’s free if guarantee period is not over.

  12. akboom wrote

    Jukka, I tried this only on a phone. In fact I set-up quite a few different RTSP test servers on our servers, including the free /test Real server but it just wouldn’t work for a mobile. The PC real player would stream it fine but it never worked on the phone.

    The Real site links that worked for me were .RM format; I also think they were using some sort of a trick where they would auto detect problems and the transport would switch to HTTP if UDP did not work.

    But it could also be a hinting problem; I have never understood what in the world hinting a 3gp file is about.

    Having said all this, I suspect our mobile operators were blocking UDP ports. I tried it with 3 different operator sims. Maybe I should have tried via our PC connectivity using GNUBox :-)
    I can’t be bothered to set-up an RTSP server again, it’s a real pain :-( If you can give me a working RTSP 3gp video file link I can try it out again.

  13. Jukka Eklund wrote

    Try this one:
    rtsp://mobile.live.sonera.com/ftp/yle/yle24/video/uusin.3gp

    Finnish news :)

  14. akboom wrote

    With a GPRS connection it straight away gives an error “not enough bandwidth”.

    With an EDGE connection the server times out :-( Is it safe to conclude that our operators are blocking the UDP ports?

  15. Jukka Eklund wrote

    No, you cannot be sure without asking from your operator. Another site you might check: http://wap.nrk.no/wurfl/mobiltv/main.jsp?REF=0

  16. ninka wrote

    Hi ALL!

    I have an urgent question: is it possible to lay a graphic layer over a video layer in a mobile application with j2me or i should rather stick to symbian c++ programming?

    Thx a lot in advance!

    ninka

  17. akboom wrote

    Yes, I would assume that you can create an application (MIDLET) that utilises MMAPI for your audio video needs.

    Boom

  18. Daniele Sassi wrote

    Same problem with streaming..
    Everything works fine on our in house test helix server, but it seems like it is impossible to strema from many external rtsp:// links like this one for example:

    rtsp://real.playstream.com:554/robin/real_001.rm

    Any ideas about how to solve this dilemma ?

    Thank you.

  19. akBoom wrote

    Mate, this is 21 months old :-)
    Anyway, I think your operator is blocking rtsp ports. Try it with wifi, it may work.

    BOOM

  20. passe-partout wrote

    Same issues here. Can stream locally over WiFi but not over EDGE / UMTS. I did however get it to stream properly when going over the EDGE network while using the phone as modem, so that rules out port blocking from the network.

  21. fnc wrote

    This may help someone.
    I have an IP camera on my LAN serving an MPEG-4 stream via rtsp to the internet. On the router I opened a non-default TCP port for RTSP and 4 UDP ports for RTP and RTCP both for video.
    These UDP ports need to be opened server-side so that active clients like Real Player Mobile can initiate connection.
    For some time I could not connect from Nokia E90 until I discovered that it has no support for secure streams. The minute I took authentication away, it finally connected and works very well.
    If you connect via WLan be sure to open client-side firewall UDP ports matching the ones setup on real player.

    So anyone knows if some new version of real player mobile will support secure streams? (or does it already?)

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