The new project GstOpenMAX has kicked off. It aims to merge efforts from the Bellagio project (STMicro) and the GOmx (Texas Instruments) project into one solid OpenMAX IL plug-in for GStreamer.
You can check all the details here.
The easiest way to see OpenMAX IL is to think about OpenGL. both standards are controlled by the Khronos Group, both standards are open and royalty free.
In a similar way you can think of Bellagio/OpenMAX IL as Mesa/OpenGL. They are not official implementations, but they follow the standard.
There are many Open Source encoders/decoders, but they all have different API’s, so in order to use them you need to learn the API. In fact some projects as FFmpeg constantly change their API, so it makes things difficult.
If you use Bellagio’s omxil you don’t have to worry about FFmpeg’s API changes, those are wrapped inside a standard API.
The standard has been reviewed by several parties including: Texas Instruments, ARM, ATI Technologies, Beatnik, Broadcom, Emuzed, Fraunhofer, Freescale, Infineon, Intel, Motorola, Nokia, NVIDIA, Philips, SKY MobileMedia, Samsung, Sasken, Siemens, ST Microelectronics, and Symbian.
The gst-openmax project is a collaboration between Fluendo, Nokia, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and the Open Source community which aims to bring OpenMAX IL functionality into GStreamer.
The following is a diagram showing examples of what could be possible to do with OpenMAX IL:
Here is an example application. It’s both an MP3 and Vorbis audio decoder that uses Bellagio’s omxil, as you can see the only thing you need to do in this case to switch from mp3 to vorbis is change the name of the OpenMAX IL component, the rest is exactly the same.
Felipe Contreras 