I’m Martin Webb, technology manager for multimedia here at Symbian. I thought I would write a short post to update those who aren’t yet following the Symbian Multimedia blog on the main discussions that have been going on:
- Contribution opportunities! We’re building an activity focused on achieving closer integration between the browser and the video player. Want to get involved?!
- Introductions from some of the package owners in the multimedia domain
- A discussion with one of the companies involved in mobile video – and I’m looking for more companies willing to share their views of the multimedia marketplace
- My views on how mobile fits in to the often-discussed concepts of three-screen strategies
I look forward to seeing you on the blog!
I think key features in multimedia – adding support for avi video in standard player! Also it would be very positive to make standard audio player more beautiful. Also one of the most wanted functions is an ability to easily drag and move images in gallery! Also it is highly needed to make an option in gallery to view images by their folders!
Is it possible to get rid of delay in video player starting clip? It is varies on devices from 1 to 3 secs?
A media player should be one that’s able to support multiple file formats. And if not, it should have ability to download codecs to play a certain file if it’s not supported. An ideal media player should also play almost all resolutions including HD.
@Alexander: while it’s not possible to remove the delay entirely, it it possible to tr to (i) reduce it and (ii) make it more consistent.
Alexander makes a good proposal – who in the community is able to pick up the analysis of where delays are incurred?
@Moser: S60 devices today already support a wide variety of file formats and codecs – although there are devices on the market that mandate only one particular format, Symbian goes for breadth of support.
Your cloud services approach to resolving playability issues defintely does have mileage and it is something that has been discussed before – the challenge is probably mostly in the IP ownership behind the mass-market codecs, making it hard to make these freely and safely available.
Regarding the resolution support, I think it is fair to acknowledge that devices have to make trade-offs here. Although devices capable of 1080p will soon be available, not all encodes at a given resolution are born equal, due to the different profiles and levels within each codec. The challenge here is explaining this stuff to end-users, who may struggle to understand why an H264 baseline profile level 4 is supported but level 4.1 isn’t…
the most important things need to come in UI department .
1. making the gallary more usable and add folder support. its simply not logical to show every picture/photos at once .folder support.
2. faster photo viewer. just try rescoviewer (a symbian app) and compare its speed with native gallary.
2. a single media player interface with music , video and podcast player. why keep real player like an 3rd party app.
3. if possible , inbuilt support for important codecs like FLAC and divx. more is better but these two ate important.
4. better album art support. currently album art doesn’t show up if it isn’t in “cover(front)” .
@tamoghno:
Fair comments! Fortunately most of these improvement opportunities have been spotted earlier by Nokia, who will be contributing significant improvements in S^3 regarding having fewer apps with wider functionality, better gallery usability and gallery views. The upcoming changes can be seen in the backlogs of the respective Multimedia Applications wiki pages.
UI is currently one of the most important areas we focus in Symbian and the results will start to be obvious on the new coming Symbian devices soon.