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. It is intended for low power and embedded system devices (including

smartphone A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, whic ...

game console A video game console is an electronic device that outputs a video signal or image to display a video game that can be played with a game controller. These may be home consoles, which are generally placed in a permanent location connected to a t ...

digital media player A digital media player (also sometimes known as a streaming device or streaming box) is a type of consumer electronics device designed for the storage, playback, or viewing of digital media content. They are typically designed to be integra ...

s, and

set-top box A set-top box (STB), also colloquially known as a cable box and historically television decoder, is an information appliance device that generally contains a TV-tuner input and displays output to a television set and an external source of sign ...

es) 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. OpenMAX provides three layers of interfaces: application layer (AL), integration layer (IL) and development layer (DL). OpenMAX is managed by the

non-profit A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...

technology

consortium A consortium (plural: consortia) is an association of two or more individuals, companies, organizations or governments (or any combination of these entities) with the objective of participating in a common activity or pooling their resources for ...

Khronos Group 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 ...

History

Initially announced in July 2004. The OpenMAX Working Group was initially founded by members

ARM In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between th ...

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American Multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, United States. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company split into two independent p ...

Samsung The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...

STMicroelectronics STMicroelectronics N.V. commonly referred as ST or STMicro is a Dutch multinational corporation and technology company of French-Italian origin headquartered in Plan-les-Ouates near Geneva, Switzerland and listed on the French stock market. ST ...

, and

Texas Instruments Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, that designs and manufactures semiconductors and various integrated circuits, which it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers globall ...

. Version 1.0 of the specification was published in December 2005. The last draft produced by the OpenMAX Working Group (1.2.0) dates from 2011 and no product has been declared as conformant since 2012. 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.

Layers

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 An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how t ...

(API). OpenMAX IL is the interface between media framework, (such as StageFright or MediaCodec API on Android,

DirectShow DirectShow (sometimes abbreviated as DS or DShow), 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 ear ...

on Windows,

FFmpeg FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing of vid ...

GStreamer GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one format, processes them, ...

on Linux), and a set of multimedia components (such as an audio or video

codec A codec is a device or computer program that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder on a signal or da ...

s). 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. OpenMAX DL is the interface between physical hardware, such as

digital signal processor A digital signal processor (DSP) is a specialized microprocessor chip, with its architecture optimized for the operational needs of digital signal processing. DSPs are fabricated on MOS integrated circuit chips. They are widely used in audio si ...

(DSP) chips,

CPUs A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, and ...

GPUs A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobil ...

, and software, like video

s and 3D engines. It allows companies to easily integrate new hardware that supports OpenMAX DL without reoptimizing their low level software.

Application layer

OpenMAX AL accommodates common multimedia application use cases by standardizing a set of representative

objects Object may refer to: General meanings * Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept ** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place ** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter * Goal, an ...

, as well as

interfaces Interface or interfacing may refer to: Academic journals * Interface (journal), ''Interface'' (journal), by the Electrochemical Society * ''Interface, Journal of Applied Linguistics'', now merged with ''ITL International Journal of Applied Lin ...

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.

Features

OpenMAX AL features include: *Video playback and recording *Audio playback and recording *Image capture (camera) and display *Camera controls *Radio and RDS *Basic

MIDI MIDI (; Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and re ...

playback *Metadata extraction and insertion

Digital TV extension

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.

Specification versions

* OpenMAX AL 1.0 Provisional Specification - a provisional version, dated 2007-09-02, to facilitate feedback from the community before the final 1.0 release.
OpenMAX AL 1.0 Specification
- dated 2009-06-23
OpenMAX AL 1.0.1 Specification
- dated 2010-03-12
OpenMAX AL 1.1 Specification
- dated 2011-01-18

Implementations

* Android 4.0 and later exposes OpenMAX AL as part of its NDK (Native Development Kit).
LIM OpenMAX
is an open source implementation of OpenMAX AL and OpenMAX IL for Linux
Bellagio
is an open source OpenMAX IL implementation for Linux maintained by

.
Tizonia
is an open source OpenMAX IL implementation for Linux

Comparison with OpenSL ES

OpenSL ES OpenSL ES (Open Sound Library for Embedded Systems) 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 f ...

(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: * Audio playback and recording * Basic MIDI playback * Metadata extraction

Integration layer

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. Open source OpenMAX IL implementations are available,
Bellagio
is maintained by STMicroelectronics.
LIM OpenMAX
an implementation that has both AL and IL.
Android StageFright
an partial implementation of IL that is the de facto standard.

Development layer

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

s and other integrated media processing engines. The functional scope of the OpenMAX DL interface spans several domains including

signal processing Signal processing is an electrical engineering subfield that focuses on analyzing, modifying and synthesizing ''signals'', such as audio signal processing, sound, image processing, images, and scientific measurements. Signal processing techniq ...

and

image processing An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensiona ...

audio coding An audio coding format (or sometimes audio compression format) is a content representation format for storage or transmission of digital audio (such as in digital television, digital radio and in audio and video files). Examples of audio coding f ...

, image coding, and

video coding A video coding format (or sometimes video compression format) is a content representation format for storage or transmission of digital video content (such as in a data file or bitstream). It typically uses a standardized video compression algo ...

. OpenMAX DL is split into five application domains: * AC - Audio Codecs (MP3 decoder and AAC decoder components) * IC - Image Codecs (JPEG components) * IP - Image Processing (Generic image processing functions) * SP - Signal Processing (Generic audio processing functions) * VC - Video Codecs (H.264 and MP4 components)

Implementations

* Optimized implementations for

NEON Neon is a chemical element with the symbol Ne and atomic number 10. It is a noble gas. Neon is a colorless, odorless, inert monatomic gas under standard conditions, with about two-thirds the density of air. It was discovered (along with krypton ...

(for Cortex A8 cores) and

SIMD Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) is a type of parallel processing in Flynn's taxonomy. SIMD can be internal (part of the hardware design) and it can be directly accessible through an instruction set architecture (ISA), but it should ...

(for

ARM11 ARM11 is a group of 32-bit RISC ARM processor cores licensed by ARM Holdings. The ARM11 core family consists of ARM1136J(F)-S, ARM1156T2(F)-S, ARM1176JZ(F)-S, and ARM11MPCore. Since ARM11 cores were released from 2002 to 2005, they are no lon ...

cores), as well as an

ANSI C ANSI C, ISO C, and Standard C are successive standards for the C programming language published by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG 14 of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the ...

reference implementation, were previously available from ARM for registered users. * The OpenMAX API is supported by the

PlayStation 3 The PlayStation 3 (PS3) is a home video game console developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment. The successor to the PlayStation 2, it is part of the PlayStation brand of consoles. It was first released on Novemb ...

console.

Working group

The OpenMAX working group was founded alongside sister project

OpenVG OpenVG is an API designed for hardware-accelerated 2D vector graphics. Its primary platforms are mobile phones, gaming & media consoles and consumer electronic devices. It was designed to help manufacturers create more attractive user interfaces ...

on July 6, 2004. Promoting members in 2008 were

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...

, Creative,

Dell Inc Dell is an American based technology company. It develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services. Dell is owned by its parent company, Dell Technologies. Dell sells personal computers (PCs), servers, data ...

Ericsson (lit. "Telephone Stock Company of LM Ericsson"), commonly known as Ericsson, is a Swedish multinational networking and telecommunications company headquartered in Stockholm. The company sells infrastructure, software, and services in informat ...

Freescale Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. was an American semiconductor manufacturer. It was created by the divestiture of the Semiconductor Products Sector of Motorola in 2004. Freescale focused their integrated circuit products on the automotive, embed ...

, Imagination Technologies Group plc,

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

, IBM,

Nokia Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications industry, telecommunications, technology company, information technology, and consumer electronics corporatio ...

Nvidia Corporation Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd,

SK Telecom SK Telecom Co., Ltd. ( or ) is a South Korean wireless telecommunications operator and former film distributor and is part of the SK Group, one of the country's largest chaebols. It leads the local market with 50.5 percent share as of 2008. S ...

, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc and

References

External links

Khronos Group — OpenMAX Overview and API specificationsKhronos Group — Public API RegistryKhronos Group — OpenMAX AL 1.1 SpecificationKhronos Group — OpenMAX IL 1.1.2 SpecificationKhronos Group — OpenMAX DL 1.0.2 SpecificationARM - Free OpenMAX LibraryMentor Graphics - Nucleus MMF Leverages OpenMAX ILMentor Graphics - Press Release, Mentor Achieves Industry-First OpenMAX Conformance for Nuclues OS Multimedia Framework
{{Khronos Group standards Application programming interfaces

History

Layers

Application layer

Features

Digital TV extension

Specification versions

Implementations

Comparison with OpenSL ES

Integration layer

Development layer

Implementations

Working group

See also

References

External links