S60 Open to new features

Here's the source code for the codec discovery application I posted a couple of days ago. Use it as you wish; we have already heard from some developers who want to include automatic codec detection in their applications, so that they can use the right codec or format for a particular device.

Update Dec. 21: Here are the codec trace files for the devices we tested. These include more detailed information than is listed in the table in the previous post.

-Oren

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

We just published an overview of video development for S60 on Forum Nokia. This page includes a description of the S60 multimedia architecture and some guidelines for developing your own video applications for the platform.

As a reminder, we also published a similar guide to music development earlier.

Your comments, of course, are welcome.

-Oren

Hartti Suomela at the Forum Nokia blogs describes how to get RTSP streaming to work in a Java MIDlet. There's other useful information on that site; I keep up to date by checking the RSS feed.

-Oren

Via Tommi, this call from Kevin Sharp at the Forum Nokia blogs for success stories with Python for S60. I wrote about a couple of stories here, including the recent Manhattan Story Mashup and my own simple experiments with music social networking.

Any more experiences to report? Let Kevin know.

-Oren

Here's an update on the public release plans for the S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 (FP1) SDK. You can expect to see the C++ SDK on Forum Nokia by the middle of this month (October). The FP1 Java MIDP SDK will be available in December. As I mentioned earlier, Forum Nokia Pro members can already download the FP1 C++ SDK.

-Oren

We're all pretty excited about the new N95 multimedia computer, which was announced this week in New York. This is the first Nokia device to use S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 (FP1), which introduces new tools for multimedia (and other) developers.

Here are some of the multimedia highlights of the N95 and other FP1 devices:
- Support for Windows Media Audio (WMA) in the Multimedia Framework (MMF) (Note: this does not include API support for Windows Media DRM)
- New Content Listing Framework API: your application can retrieve, filter, and sort information about multimedia content, such as music or photos, stored in the device.
- Java JSR 234 (Advanced Multimedia Supplements): support for 3D audio effects, music equalizer control, radio tuner control

In addition to the above, FP1 supports video ringtones and "talking tones", that combine your favorite tone with a synthesized spoken name of the caller.

The FP1 SDK is already available to Forum Nokia Pro members, and should be released through Forum Nokia soon. Watch this space for updates.

Update (29-Sept.): our Flash team informs me that the N95 is also the first S60 device to support Flash Lite 2.0 (based on Flash 7), whcih has lots of new features including "dynamic loading of multimedia content such as images, sound and video"

-Oren

The latest Forum Nokia Pro newsletter included an announcement about the Manhattan Story Mashup, an urban storytelling game, where players will run around Manhattan with Nokia N80 cameraphones, taking photos that illustrate words in stories written by other players. The play happens on September 23rd, and sounds like fun!

The game was organized by the Nokia Research SensorPlanet project, which explores "large-scale wireless sensor networks". The game was designed by Ville Tulos, a researcher at Helsinki University, and Jürgen Scheible, Forum Nokia Champion and huge proponent of Python for S60. Ville wrote the Python client that is at the heart of the game software. The client consists of 1100 lines of code, and communicates with a Python server using a JSON protocol.

Nokia is helping to bring free WiFi networks to 10 major parks in New York City, starting with Central Park and Battery Park. If you have an N80 or N91 phone, you can download a free software suite that will let you enjoy news and music when you're sitting in the park (or anywhere else with a WiFi connection).

The suite includes the ParkCast Internet radio player, which, we are proud to say, is based on the open source Internet Radio for S60 software we created in the S60 Multimedia team. The Park WiFi team also created a version of ParkCast for the Nokia 770 Internet tablet.

The ParkCast player is pre-configured with links to high-quality streams from four New York radio stations, which I was able to listen to from my WiFi network in Boston. Of course, it wasn't quite the same without the benches and trees.

A quick note: the Forum Nokia blogs announced a new discussion group in Forum dedicated to porting applications to S60 3rd Edition.

-Oren