Friday, June 25, 2010

Nokia Snubs Symbian for MeeGo

A Nokia spokesperson confirmed the company will use the Linux MeeGo operating system in its flagship N-series platform in a bid to remain competitive against the iPhone and Android smartphones. MeeGo was formed in February through the merging of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo mobile operating systems. Nokia will continue to use its Symbian operating system for its lower-end smartphones.

Source: Linux news.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Skype to any device

The SkypeKit SDK supplies APIs for plugging into Skype's messaging, voice, and video chat service. It also includes an implementation of SILK, the company's audio compression codec. The SDK is currently in closed beta and is only supported on Linux at this stage. Skype intends to extend the SDK to additional platforms next month and will eventually make it more broadly accessible. Skype envisions hardware makers using the SDK to add voice and video chat to devices like televisions.

See also Ars Technica and Engadget.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Looking at VP9

Jim Bankoski, Codec Engineering Manager at Google, wrote on the WebM official blog that they have added an experimental branch to the VP8 source tree.

The WebM community can use this unstable branch to propose changes to VP8 that will produce the best video codec possible, but without the constraints of a frozen bitstream.

At some point in the future, when the experimental branch proves significantly better than the stable branch, they will create a new version of the codec.

Friday, June 18, 2010

MPEG Workshop on Visual Search

MPEG is organizing a Workshop on Visual Search, to be held in conjunction with the 93rd MPEG meeting, in Geneva, Switzerland.

The goal of the meeting is an exchange among companies and university labs driving the technology and the commercial deployment of visual search applications.

MPEG plans to host a small number of invited talks reviewing the underlying technology, addressing applications and requirements a standards body should consider, and/or reporting experiences with prototypes and commercial deployments.

Friday, June 11, 2010

H.264 (03/2010)

ITU-T Rec. H.264 version (03/2010) is now in force and freely available here.

This revision defines a new profile (the Stereo High profile) for two-view video coding with support of interlaced coding tools and specifies the frame packing arrangement SEI message, plus some miscellaneous corrections and clarifications.