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December 18, 2006 Which API works with which codecs? Your questions answered Posted by Oren at 01:22 PM | Categories: Application development, Devices, Music, Video

Some of the most common questions we hear from S60 multimedia developers concern the differences in multimedia support among different S60 devices. Because the multimedia feature set in a given device depends in large part on the device hardware, different devices may support different audio and video codecs. These hardware dependencies also affect the SDK; a particular API may only work with a subset of the supported codecs in the device.

My colleague Florin Lohan came up with a clever way to get to the bottom of this problem, and find out more about these hardware issues for you in the developer community. He wrote a simple S60 application that lists the codecs supported in the device, and ran it on every S60 device he could find to compile a comprehensive list of devices, API's, and codecs. You can download it and try it out on your favorite S60 device.

Read on for more info about the codecs and API's. We plan to publish this information to Forum Nokia as well in the near future.

-Oren

Device categories:

S60 3rd Edition
30H1: N71, N72, N73, N75, N80, N91, N92, E60, E61, E70
30H2: 3250, 5500, E50, E62
30H3: N93

S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1:
31H1: N95
31H2: 6290

Audio codecs

audio_codecs_s.gif

(Click here for full-size image)

( 1) CMMFCodec-based AAC encoder present, but there is no MMF Controller to use this codec alone. AAC encoding used in capturing video from phone's camera, or getting AAC emcapsulated inside mp4 file format (without video).
( 2) not in N80, N91
( 3) not in 5500
( 4) not in E60, E61, E65, E70, N91
( 5) not in N92,
( 6) not in N91
( 7) not in E60, E61, E70
( 8) not in 5500, E50,
( 9) not in 5500
(10) not in E62

Video codecs

video codecs.GIF

(1) RealVideo, H.263/MPEG-4 and H.264 decoders in 31H1 are HW accelerated
(2) Not in E62
(3) Not in E-Series phones (E60, E61, E70)


Permalink |

Comments

Err.... this video table/page is a mess in MSIE - you might want to rethink the layout?

Posted by: Steve Litchfield | December 18, 2006 02:59 PM

Thanks, Steve. I replaced the tables with graphics (still not ideal) until I can sort out the formatting.

Posted by: Oren Levine | December 18, 2006 05:19 PM

Great apps. I try it on some FP1 devices and get a very interesting info. At least 4 devices are very different in terms of 3D hardware :)

31H1 means 3td edition FP1 Hardware 1 (with 3D accelerator from OMAP 2420)

31H2 the same but with software accelerator, right?

Posted by: Eldar Murtazin | December 18, 2006 06:38 PM

Hello Eldar,

31H2 does not use OMAP. Except for AMR-NB encoding, all encoding and decoding is in software.
If you send the logs for those 4 devices to me, I can try to explain what is there :-)

Posted by: Florin Lohan | December 19, 2006 03:31 AM

3D graphics is a different topic, it would require another table I think.

OMAP2420 is the only HW capable of accelerated 3D graphics (OpenGL ES).

Posted by: Jukka Eklund | December 22, 2006 12:40 AM

How about accessing the codecs? Anybody is successful in that. I retrieved the devvideo encoder features on N80. But getting errors when trying to use the h.263 encoder using CMMFDevVideoRecord. I have tried the normal steps of doing it. But is there any issue in general?

Posted by: Nav | April 28, 2007 03:16 PM

I was interested on getting this list dyncamically from code. What API's have you used to accomplish this?. I am interested on getting the list of audio codecs supported by a device, as i said, dynamically, from code. Any ideas?

Posted by: Gerardo | May 7, 2007 07:16 PM

Gerardo, just take a look to the next post in this blog.
Nav, you may need professional support from Forum Nokia. This is available to Forum Nokia PRO members.

Posted by: Florin | May 9, 2007 05:10 PM

I tried your codec .sis on my E61, but got "System Error (-18)"? Does it mean that no Hardware codecs exist in my E61?
=====================================
KErrNotReady -18 A device required by an i/o operation is not ready to start operations. A common reason for returning this code is because a device has not been initialised, or has no power.
=====================================

Posted by: Gopal | October 26, 2007 02:11 PM

Oren, very useful app, but along the answers it adds some question in some areas. For example, many applications consider 8kHz, 16 bit the best audio for Nokia 6120c, but two moments confuses me, 2 of 3 audio encoders that Codecs had showed supports 48 kHz, and also mp4 videos on the device are actually recorded with the audio track at 48 kHz. Is it possible to add some audio capabilities information about the device like all possible frequencies and sample resolutions? I'm not aware of such application that supplies the information.

Also, as I found out, the app uses generic UID (0xA000017F) and this can lead to "Update error" in cases when another app uses the same UID. THe latter is possible since there are many little apps created for one's internal research needs but later becoming public. Generally it's not a big deal, but it took some time for me to find this. So if it's possible, please, assign an unique UID.

Thanks

Posted by: Max Vlasov | December 13, 2007 02:22 PM


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